'' RINGO STARR '' RINGS : LIFE HONOURS ESSAY

RINGO STARR plays on - like a man half his age. As he approaches 85, Beatles drummer's energy for his craft is undimmed.

IN THE summer of 1985, Ringo Starr's friend and fellow drummer Max Weinberg flew to England for the former Beatle's 45th birthday.

Though the pair had become chummy since meeting five years earlier in Los Angeles, backstage at a concert Weinberg was playing with Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, Weinberg remained somewhat intimidated by his boyhood hero in the early stages of their friendship.

[ The ever-amicable Starr offered advice : '' Sometimes it helps if you call me Richie.'' ]

While celebrating at Tittenhurst Park - the sprawling estate outside London that had previously belonged to John Lennon and Yoko Ono - Starr turned to his younger friend, then 34, and said something that remains an inside joke between them :

'' Well, Max, I'm going to be 45. Doesn't that make you feel old? ''

That line is classic Ringo - a dryly clever, double-take line from the man whose tossed off '' Ringo-isms '' became immortalized in Beatles song titles like. '' A Hard Day's Night '' and '' Tomorrow Never Knows.''

Each year, Starr would update the line for Weinberg, until its recitation became something of an annual tradition.

'' I imagine if I was speaking to him on July 7,'' Weinberg said in a phone interview, '' him saying to me,  ' I'm 85.' And it doesn't sound so old anymore.''

Starr, who celebrated his birthday one recent Monday, will be the first Beatle to reach the milestone, and like his surviving Paul McCartney, he never retired.

In the past seven months alone, Starr has released a country album he recorded in Nashville and toured with his All-Starr Band, a group with a rotating lineup of rock luminaries that currently features members of Men at Work and Toto.

At a recent All-Starr Band performance at Radio City Music Hall in New York, he bounded onstage with springy energy of a man half his age and spent much of the show behind an elevated drum kit, hopping away.

'' The one and only Ringo Starr plays on ''.

The World Students Society thanks Lindsay Zoladz.