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July 26, 2013 at 05:47 AM
What would I do if I had a magic wand and could make the members of the Federal Commission on Long-Term Care do my bidding
One thought: Maybe they should get Netflix to reshape the way Americans think about housing in old age by creating a new, binge-watchable version of “The Golden Girls.” Maybe, for extra credit, they could get J.J. Abrams to do a reboot for movie theaters.
“Soylent Green” is, among other things, probably the world’s most depressing movie about what it might be like to have a roommate when you’re old.
“The Golden Girls” may be one of the happiest shows about what it could be like to move into a house with three other older people in your later years.
Of course, some people have always had roommates in their senior years. Naomi had Ruth, for example.
But one challenge of helping people age in a cost-efficient, independence-preserving fashion in our society is that, for decades, advice givers told members of the Greatest Generation, the Silent Generation and the Baby Boom generation to try to live on their own.
I don’t remember whether Helen Gurley Brown wrote anything much about sex in “Sex and the Single Girl,” but what I do remember is that she advised the single girls of 1962 to do whatever they could do get their own apartments.
