Grown men like to pretend they have escaped adolescence. They acquire careers, mortgages, spouses, children, retirement accounts, cholesterol numbers, and opinions about property taxes. They learn to discuss interest rates without giggling. They attend funerals. They replace water heaters. They become, by every outward measure, adults.
And yet somewhere inside the sixty-something man sits a thirteen-year-old boy whose hormones have just detonated.
The boy remembers when the world fizzed like a glass of Alka-Seltzer. He remembers Eva Gabor floating onto Match Game, Adrienne Barbeau on Maude, Dahlia Lavi in Catlow, Jennifer O’Neill in Summer of ’42, Ursula Andress in Dr. No, Nancy Archer and Honey Parker in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and Mary Ann and Ginger on Gilligan’s Island. These women did not merely appear on television or movie screens. They altered atmospheric pressure. They made the furniture hum. They turned an ordinary Tuesday night into an annunciation.
Half a century later, the man remembers them with an intensity he finds embarrassing.
He should be past all this. Good God, he is in his sixties. He has accomplishments. He has experience. He has endured loss, raised children, paid bills, navigated marriage, watched his parents age, and contemplated his own mortality. Surely all this should have transformed him into that mythical creature known as the Mature Man.
And to some extent it has.
But not enough.
Because deep inside him, untouched by the decades, the thirteen-year-old remains seated on his throne.
Call it Adolescent Apotheosis: the elevation of one’s adolescent self into the supreme version of the self, the golden incarnation against which every subsequent stage of life seems slightly fraudulent. The boy is not merely remembered. He has been canonized.
At first the man assumes this is nostalgia. But nostalgia doesn’t explain the voltage.
Neither does sex.
Certainly sex is involved. Let us not insult the evidence. The thirteen-year-old did not admire Adrienne Barbeau because of her comic timing.
But what he really worships is the consciousness he possessed when he first saw these women. At thirteen, desire had arrived before disappointment had acquired tenure. The future stretched before him like an enormous amusement park whose gates had just opened. Anything might happen.
The women became icons of this state. Eva Gabor, Jennifer O’Neill, Honey Parker, Mary Ann, Ginger, Adrienne Barbeau—stained-glass saints in the Church of Infinite Possibility.
This is why seeing their photographs decades later can produce such disproportionate emotion. He isn’t merely looking at Adrienne Barbeau.
He is looking through her.
On the other side is himself at thirteen: absurd, frightened, libidinous, hopeful, ignorant, unfinished—and magnificently alive.
The sixty-something man possesses things the boy could not imagine: maturity, competence, money, domesticity, fatherhood, knowledge. He should regard these as victories.
And he does.
Sort of.
That is his shame.
Because none of them make the world fizz.
Sometimes he suspects that everything after adolescence has been an elaborate diplomatic mission conducted on the boy’s behalf. The adult travels through the world collecting experiences, possessions, accomplishments, and relationships, periodically returning to the palace to report his findings.
The boy listens politely.
“Very impressive,” he says.
“Now tell me about Honey Parker.”
Cinemorphosis 
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