Tuning the radio dial while driving through the mountains the other day, I came across a commercial for an Orson Welles recording of a song called “I Know What It’s Like To Be Young But You Don’t Know What It’s Like To Be Old.” The title is pretty much the whole song. But I wonder if it’s true, at least from the dramatist’s point of view. It’s certainly the case that young writers can have trouble thinking themselves into characters fifty years older, but at least as often writers creating young characters have trouble discarding their awareness of what comes after: it’s precisely because they do know what it’s like to be young and old that they find it hard to put aside the latter half of the equation. Craig Carnelia, a workmanlike Broadway lyricist who came a cropper recently on The Sweet Smell of Success, wrote a modest hit a few years ago called Is There Life After High School?, whose best song, “There’s A Kid Inside,” is a catalogue of the eternal adolescent lurking inside all of us as the clock ticks on into middle age and beyond:

“I can hear my band
That awful band
Only now it sounds much better
I can feel my hand
My trembling hand
On Michelle’s angora sweater.”

Very vivid: the fingers quivering over the bra cup. But it’s a poignant image, a wistful evocation of loss; it’s youth viewed from age. Knowing what it’s