THE LOOK-ALIKE YEARS

By CALVIN TRILLIN

A NEIGHBOR OF MINE NAMED DAVID ROTHENBERG, WHO HAS MANAGED TO reach the age of 62, informed me with some pride recently that he is now eligible for the senior-citizen discount at many movie theaters.

"How do they know you're 62?" I asked him. Could it be, I was wondering, that the accumulation of regulations in this country has reached the point at which citizens are regularly carded at both ends?

"Most ticket sellers are about 18," he said. "To them, we all look alike."

A lot of people are unenthusiastic about becoming eligible for the slim privileges that go with age. A 50-year-old man who receives an invitation to join an organization that offers vitamin discounts for the mature may resent it as a harbinger of that dreaded day when he takes his wife's hand during an evening stroll through the park and overhears some college kid on a nearby bench saying, "Isn't that cute!"

David, on the other hand, seemed to consider his movie discount what people in Washington would call an entitlement, richly deserved and untouchable. He spoke of it with such youthful enthusiasm that I found myself wondering, just for a moment, whether there was any possibility at all that someone could hold off the ravages of age by repeated viewings of Hollywood movies at half price.

But can it really be that those of us who are older than Bill Clinton all look alike to those he brought with him to the White House? Is it possible that Bob Dole, when asked whether he's too old for the presidency, could satisfy a large part of the electorate on that point simply by saying that he and Steve Forbes and Pat Buchanan are about the same age? The answer is clouded by the fact that Phil Gramm actually does look about the same age as Bob Dole, and did even before the results of the Louisiana caucuses were in.

There is some evidence against David's notion that in the eyes of younger people everyone born before the Inchon landing melds together into a single blob of undifferentiated old coot. There is, for instance, my favorite theory about why Ronald Reagan, the most successful oldie-but-goodie candidate in recent times, did so poorly in the Iowa caucuses in 1980, compared with 1976--a theory quickly forgotten after he reclaimed his microphone and his future in New Hampshire.

According to the theory, the Iowa voters of 1976, catching the campaign on TV screens that had more snow than the back 40, assumed that Reagan still looked like the Gipper. Four years later they had cable.

"Do you really get the geezer discount without question every time?" I asked David.

A few days earlier, he said, he'd requested a senior-citizen ticket from a ticket seller who was "a woman of some years." There are a few of them left. They now have legal recourse if management tries to ease them out, as Forbes discovered when he fired his secretary for unauthorized aging.

"Do you have any identification?" the ticket seller asked. Was she going to card him?

"Madam, you flatter me," David said in reply.

She smiled and waved him in.

It occurred to me that one of the resources available to people of some years is a certain polished charm. Somebody should tell Dole.