At age 24, Rodney Rothman was the head writer of "Late Show with David Letterman." His writing career was taking off and his work was being published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and McSweeney's. He then got a job as a writer on Judd Apatow's ("Freaks and Geeks") new show, "Undeclared." But when that show got cancelled, instead of plugging ahead with his burgeoning career, Rothman decided he had had enough of working, and retired. He found a roommate service who set him up with a room in one of Boca Raton's most famous retirement communities, Century Village, and began to live the life of a Florida retiree. He woke up at 6 a.m., took up shuffleboard, spent time at the pool with the local gossips, started palling around with a comedian approaching the century mark, and later became good friends with a former heroin-dealer-turned-real-estate-agent. All these experiences and more were put into his book, Early Bird, one of the most entertaining memoirs to come out in a long time. Rodney was kind enough to do an email interview with me. For more info, check out his website.

What was the hardest thing to adjust to after your retirement ended?
I'd say the hardest thing to adjust to was just having to actually get stuff done again. When I was “retired” and researching the book, it was the perfect thing, because my job involved sitting on my butt by a pool all day. Pure genius.

How does your daily routine now compare to your old one?
I get up earlier, but that's as much a result of the discipline I had to instill in myself to actually write a book as it is a result of getting up earlier while living in Century Village

Are you still in contact with any of the people in the book?
I am still in contact with lots of people from the book, especially since the book came out. Amy Ballinger, a 95-year-old former stand-up comedian that I spent a good amount of time with, uses email. She read a description of herself in The New York Times as a “foul mouthed comedienne” and immediately fired off an angry, all-capital-letters email to me, where she probably deployed 15 f-bombs.

Having gone to Boca to promote the book, what's been the reaction down there to the book?
The reaction has been all positive so far. I did a reading in Boca Raton and like 250 retirees showed up. I sort of felt like Tom Jones.

How did the retirees view towards a job/career differ from yours, and
why do you think this is?
I don't want to generalize about it, but I would say that a lot of the people I knew down there didn't have the luxury of choice that most people my age (who are middle class or above) have as far as choice in career. Anytime I implied that I was in the process of “finding myself” one of the retirees down there would eat me alive. I would say that I consider switching jobs because I don't love my job, and they would say, “Who says you have to love your job?”

Knowing what you do now, how would you try to gain acceptance to
something like "the pool group" when you are retired in the future?
If you want to get in with the “pool group” – the group of women who hang out every day at the pool, the Queen Bees of the community – then my advice is to bring them some good dirt about someone else in the community. Trash talk is the currency at the swimming pool.

What's your real opinion on shuffleboard?
I kind of love shuffleboard. It's a real Zen sport. If you have a lot of aggression and testosterone, you're going to do poorly. It really is the sort of sport you have to be eighty years old to master. You have to be mellow, the kind of mellow that a 28 year old just can't be.

Can you talk a bit about the "Earlybird" pilot and how that was
similar and different from the book?
I made a pilot for NBC that was loosely based on the book. It was fictionalized but had the same tone – funny but also attempting to be as truthful and unsparing as possible about what it's like to be older. NBC opted not to move forward with it. I think that when I told them I wanted to do a show about older people they thought I meant people in their 30's.

Was there anything that got cut from the book that you really wanted to include?
There were lots of people I met that I would have liked to have written about. One that springs to mind is Eli, a Mennonite retiree in his mid eighties. I met him while I was playing senior softball. Though Eli weighed only 100 pounds he was a pretty solid softball plater. There is a sizeable Mennonite community in Sarasota , Florida , it turns out. Eli and I would hang and talk about religion. He was also into some pretty adventurous dietary notions. A great guy. Maybe I'll write about him some other time.

Are there any habits or sayings that you picked up while retired and
still use now?
My favorite is the term “fella,” I try to call all my friends fella now. They're getting used to it.

What do you miss the most about retired life?
I miss how social it was. It was like being back in college for half a year, but without the homework.

What's next for you?
What's next? Sheesh, probably getting thrown in prison and writing a book about that.

Photo by Mindy Stricke