You might not peg Dan Etcher as a Walt Disney World kind of guy. You're most likely to see the tall sophisticate at the latest chic club opening in Toronto. He has no kids. But for his holiday in February, Etcher got lost in the Magic Kingdom with a buddy.
"It was fantastic -- very cool," the twentysomething says. "I'm already planning on going again soon."
And he's not just saying this because he enjoyed touring the on-site MGM studios with beer in hand -- although he did. "I try to be as much of a kid as possible," he says. "When I'm at work, I have responsibility, I make decisions and I have people to answer to."
Welcome to the lighthearted new world of the Rejuveniles, adults who so cherish childlike things, they plan their travel, leisure and even work around them.
Los Angeles-based author Christopher Noxon, who coined the term in the New York Times, has now published a book called Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-up.
"It's hard to imagine adults in previous eras so unashamedly indulging their inner children. But these are not the adults of 20 years ago," he writes. "They constitute a new breed of adult identified by a determination to remain playful, energetic and flexible in the face of adult responsibilities."
It's all part of a growing cluster of lifestyle phenomena that have inspired such labels as "Twixter" and "adultescent." At its most benign, it's the Lexus-driving strait-laced executive who keeps a stash of baseball cards. At its creepy extreme: Michael Jackson or plush-toy fetishists known as "Furbies."
Somewhere in between is the critical mass of Rejuveniles such as Noxon who play school-kid games like kickball instead of golf and revere Bart Simpson the way a previous generation might have revered Cary Grant.
Toronto's Iris Wilde is typical. Tech-support worker by day, the mother of two recently turned into a stealth Barbie planter by night: When her friend Barbara turned 50, Wilde and neighbour Sandra Fairman covered the birthday girl's lawn with dolls they had picked up at Value Village. "It was a lot more fun playing with the Barbies now than when I was a kid," Wilde says.
It's fitting that Rejuvenile was released in late June: Summer is the ultimate playtime -- outdoors and in. "It's a time when adults are given more licence to drop the mature façade and let themselves go," Noxon says in an interview.
Especially when it comes to what Noxon calls "youngest-common- denominator" blockbuster movies.
"The summer movie slate this year has been vivid in its combining of adult and kid sensibilities," he says. "Superman is a great example of how to play across those lines. There's no expectation that it would be anything else. Which is really the telling sign. When you go back to the first Batman movie, that was a movie for kids."
Similar crossovers are happening everywhere, including the haute art-toy market à la Hello Kitty and the breakfast-cereal restaurant fad. There's illustrator Taro Gomi's gorgeously weird colouring books, like the new Doodles: A Really Giant Coloring and Doodling Book, which cost $25 and can hold their own on a Noguchi coffee table.
At Toronto's Rivoli bar tomorrow, Rejuveniles can buy cool stuff and listen to rock tunes at an event called Whipped Sundaes. Among the participants is Sean Ward, who quit his job four years ago to create comic books starring "Mr. Lollipop" and related ventures. Like many Peter Pans, he has found a profitable way to keep himself in Jell-O and reconnect to the "idea that joy is our natural state," he says.
But what happened to the old-fashioned adult who was once content in the world of briefcases, mortgages and martinis?
For the boomer Rejuvenile, nostalgia may drive toy-collecting and Popsicle-eating, whereas the Gen Xer's delay in settling down is no doubt tied up in suspended adolescence.
