The Stones? Forget About It

By Tony Kornheiser

Sunday, October 26, 1997; Page F01
The Washington Post 

I had tickets to the Rolling Stones concert the other night.

But I completely forgot to go.

Short-term memory loss has begun to be a problem for me.

(As it has for some of the Stones; in Boston, they tell me,
Jagger, now 56, kicked into "Satisfaction" and sang, "I can't get
no . . . I can't get no . . . I can't get no . . . " and he seemed
puzzled, and his voice trailed off. Some people in the audience
tried to help out, suggesting what Mick couldn't get. One
shouted, "no focaccia?" Another offered, "no discount fare
without staying over a Saturday night?")

There was an article in the Health section last week about
coping with short-term memory loss. (I knew it was aimed at
geezers, because the examples started like this: "You have
misplaced your medications . . . " And though I have not yet
entered geezerdom, I can see it from here -- provided I put on
my bifocals.) The article provided tips on how to train your
memory. One of them was: "rehearse-repeat."

The example given: "You are in the shower and you get an idea
you wish to discuss with your spouse. You can't make a note,
and you don't want that great new idea to slip away. What to
do?"

(Here's why I failed the test. I said: Quickly get out of the
shower and write the idea in lipstick on the bathroom mirror.
And then, as long as you're out of the shower, go and find a
notepad so you can copy the message from the mirror. But of
course that involves a lot of thinking, and if you've got
short-term memory loss you're bound to wonder why you're
holding a pencil while you're naked, soaking wet and dripping
on the carpet.)

The answer was to repeat the idea out loud over and over to
seal it into your memory.

Well, that's fine, I guess. But here's what most geezers with
memory loss would do: Stay in the shower repeating the idea
over and over for hours until the water seeped through the floor
and into the condominium below. And then those people would
become alarmed and call the Emergency Medical Trauma
center on the speed dial, and the medics would break into this
poor slob's apartment and drag him out of the shower, and
they would get him committed because he kept babbling, "I am
out of Feen-a-Mint! I am out of Feen-a-Mint!"

Another of the tips on training your memory was: "Use cues."

You know, like acronyms. The example of HOMES is given.
HOMES is an acronym for the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario,
Michigan, Evelyn and the other one. Some people use the first
letters of their children's names to help them remember
something. In my case Michael and Elizabeth would help me
remember: ME (which people who know me say I focus on
anyway) or Em, the aunt in "The Wizard of Oz." Obviously,
families are required to produce more children to memorize
something substantial.

My favorite application of the use of cues involved numbers. If
you have difficulty remembering them, you should "change the
numbers into letters that correspond to their location on a
telephone keypad." So your Social Security number,
475-29-2697, would turn into GRJBXAMYP. Who would
make that choice? I mean other than Gen. Shalikashvili?

I'm sorry, I must have gotten sidetracked. Was I talking about
the Rolling Stones?

The last thing I need to do is point out that the Stones are old.
You can see they're old. The lines in Keith Richard's face are
so furrowed, he qualifies for crop subsidies. The Stone I
admire the most is Bill Wyman, the bass player who quit the
band a few years ago because he knew he was too old.
Wyman is 61 now. He has married so many women of so
many different ages and morphologies and fathered so many
children with so many half-siblings running around that
everyone has lost track of who is related to whom. And,
statistically speaking, some of them have probably intermarried,
so I believe at this point Bill Wyman is technically his own
biological grandson.

My friend Nancy and her sister went to see the Stones. I asked
her if she was going because the Stones might not come around
again, and she said, "I'm going because I might not come
around again."

Before they went Nancy and her sister agreed it was important,
even at their age, that as a gesture of nostalgia they bring some
contraband to the concert. The Stones were, after all, the
ultimate outlaw band. 

"Will you bring drugs?" I asked.

"Absolutely not," Nancy said firmly.

"Oh, come on, something mild, for a small buzz," I suggested.
"How about Claritin?"

The next day Nancy called me to say, "Before we went we
dropped some ginkoba. It's supposed to improve memory. I've
lost so many brain cells at previous Stones concerts, I hoped I
might get some back at this one."

"Stones concert?" I said. "Didn't I have tickets to that?" 

The Tony Kornheiser Unofficial Home Page