Question: What do Dolly Parton, Liza Minnelli and Cher have in common?
Hint: It’s the same thing that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump have in common.
Further hint: Also Sylvester Stallone, Reggie Jackson, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, Patti Smith, Susan Sarandon and Steven Spielberg.
Answer: If you guessed that all these folks are celebrating 80th birthdays this year, my advice: Spend less time tracing celebrity news.
My own interest in octogenarians is becoming entirely too personal. No, I’m not blowing out 80 candles any time soon. But I’ve been to one 80th birthday party in 2026 (mazel tov, Joanie!), declined an invitation to another (sorry, Chris), am planning a third (looking at you, Merf) and cheering on my friends Josh Getlin and Heidi Evans, who aren’t 80, but whose book about Liza, “Kids Wait Till You Hear This!” just dropped.
Here is what’s cool about turning 80 this year. Dolly, Liza, Cher, et al., are part of the birth class of 1946, which means that by most reckonings, they’re the vanguard of the post-World War II baby boom. Which means they were the first humans to grow up on television and rock and roll.
Some fought in Vietnam. Some burned their draft cards. Some burned their bras. Some became hippies and later, yuppies.
You’ll note that the three presidents on our list did none of those things. Neither did my big sister, turning 80 this October. We think of generations monolithically, thanks, I suspect, to the news media’s tropism toward whatever’s trendy. During the ‘60s, for example, hippies made good copy. Kids who dressed like, voted with and followed their parents into soul-crushing jobs – which was most of them – did not.
I don’t place much stock in slicing and dicing the population along generational lines. Focusing on whether we’re boomers, millennials, Gen X, Gen Z, etc., is like answering only one of the five Ws in a news story. Yes, when we grew up says something about who we are – it’s why we journalists routinely ask our sources their ages – but where we grew up, who raised us and how we were raised matter just as much.
If anything, what’s striking about my list of octogenarians is how unlike each other they are, apart from the obvious fact that some combination of talent, grit and luck led to their becoming famous. What impresses me about all of them is they’re still in the news, still talked about, still in the game in one way or another (though I wish some of them weren’t).
Oldsters like me can start to feel like we’re fading away, like characters in a cartoon whose outlines begin to blur until they disappear altogether. Sometimes that growing invisibility takes the form of meeting young adults who don’t ask me any questions – as if my experience can no longer be relevant to their experience.
I once saw a documentary about the lives of the elderly in which one of the interviewees took exception to being asked about what things were like “in her day.”
“My day?” she exclaimed. “This is my day.”
In other words, in case you haven’t noticed, whippersnappers, your elders are still here.
Having looked up celebs born in 1946, I thought I’d end by sharing a few of the fun facts I ran across about some of them:
Dolly Parton: Both a species of lichen (Japewiella dollypartonia) and an asteroid (10731) were named in her honor. Quote: “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.”
Cher: Her birth name is Cheryl Sarkasian. Among her many claims to fame: She is supposedly the first woman to expose her belly button on TV.
Reggie Jackson: Reggie was the second pick in the 1966 MLB draft. The first, taken by – who else? – the New York Mets, was a guy named Steve Chilcott. Chilcott never made it to the bigs; Reggie’s in the Hall of Fame.
Sylvester Stallone: His childhood nickname was Binky. His middle name is Gardenzio.
Tommy Lee Jones: At Harvard, he roomed with Al Gore.
Steven Spielberg: He was rejected by the University of Southern California School of Cinema Arts – twice.
Bill Clinton: He once mixed flavors at the Penn State Creamery (I was there).
Donald Trump: He thinks he won the 2020 election.
One final octo note: Many of the musicians I listened to in high school are also 80 years old. I list them as a footnote here because they were all born in 1945, ergo they’re turning 81 this year: Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Neil Young, John Fogerty and Stephen Stills. We used to wonder what these young rockers would do when they got old. Now we know: bop ‘til you drop.
So here’s to the octogenarians among us (most of them, anyway). They’re showing us whippersnappers how it’s done.
