Fabulous at Every Age

I just finished reading this months Bazaar.  It’s March, my birthday month, and, as painful as birthdays are becoming, I still like it when my horoscope is at the top of the page.  So, I’m flipping through, while sitting in my reading chair in my nice cashmere bathrobe that has been eaten to expensive grey swiss cheese by moths, slightly flu-ey from something the kids had and blew through like it was a good bag of potato chips and has kept me on the couch for two days,  when I come to the monthly section titled “Fabulous at Every Age”.  I suddenly felt a bit pissy.  I will admit, before I go on, that I am at the height of PMS.  Ask the spouse.  The fight we had this morning was ABOUT the tone he took while discussing ice cream last night.  The proportions it took on were as if he had slept with my sister.  And her best friend.  In my bed.  While they were both wearing my clothes.  My good clothes.  Although I still maintain you can not be cavalier when discussing ice cream.

Anyway, post fight, I took a look at my Bazaar and came to page 280 and thought, “Well, Fuck You”.  This would be the “Fabulous at Every Age” section.  ”Fabulous at Every Age”.  Well, don’t we all know what that means.  That means, that while young, smooth, boney girls with long face hugged by uncolored hair and butts that float as if sitting on a shelf and boobs that point like the finest of silos tilted in the wind, wearing the latest in animal prints and plexiglass footware are truly FABULOUS and that’s why they are the focus of almost every fashion magazine known to man.  But what they are also saying, these arbiters of “Fabulous at Every Age” is that you, you know who you are, you of a certain age that features gentle softening of flesh, drooping of boob and butt, hair that can’t begin to remember the color nature wanted it to be,  well, yes, you can try to be fabulous.  At any age.  It’s worth a try.  Smug look.  Slight grimace.  Gay sashay.  Tight grin.  It might work. Chuckle with slight sadness behind the eyes.

Lets’ just peruse this months issue.  In your 20’s, they say, you should “enrich your ensemble with rouge hues”.  There’s some hot blonde I’ve never heard of wearing something sequined the size of my underpants and heels that would cause instant back spasms grinning saucily and flashing kohl rimmed eyes.  For the 30 somethings, the proposal is the “shimmer in muted metalics”.  The oh so shimmerry Cate Blanchett is shimmering in the photo, every inch the movie star  shimmerer. The 40’s.  Marisa Tomei.  She’s gorg, no doubt.  She’s wearing a pantsuit with a nautical feel.  The 40’s proposal is “geometric accents in monochrome colors add a rich feel.”  The outfits resemble something one might wear on a high end cruise that involved nothing sporty but only dressing for elegant meals.  50’s are subbosed to do LBDS (please, someone tell me what an LBD is, I suspect it is Little Black Dress but doesn’t it sound like an STD?) LBD”S and mosaics.   Don’t know if that means you have to be covered in small tiles and grout but it sounds like it could be a project for the whole family.  Kids have fun and mom end’s up fashionably dressed although with an STD.   60’s should lean toward Black and White, and my god, the poor 70’s have to do the “Chic Separate”.  At least they are willing to acknowledge that 70’s are still alive.

 Now I don’t have an issue with the choices they’ve made for each age.  In fact, the women look lovely and the outfits are pretty great.  The issue I have is the idea that there are clothes that are acceptable at some age that are unacceptable at another.  And that some magazine can tell you what those rules are.  My friend Vicki’s mother, well into her eighties, insisted on wearing one piece sherbet colored jump suits, three inch heels, a modified beehive and eye liner she could only have learned at the school of Cleopatra.  There was nothing “Chic or Separate” about her, particularly given the jumpsuit.  And granted, she was in her eighties, an age group Bazaar must assume are all dead.  But there was something so memorable about the way she sashayed through life, even when her hips and knees gave out and literal sashaying was out of the question.  She died some years back but I still think of her on occasion and grin.  She didn’t listen to any rules (ironically her daughter is arguably the chicest woman I know, a fashion arbiter if there ever was one but she loved her mom’s wacked out style and would NEVER have tried to change her), it never occured to her that something might not be officially deemed age appropriate.  She just knew what she liked and, baby, she owned it.

Or how about Bjork, the oh so groovy Icelandic singer.  I ran into Bjork at the mall last Saturday night.  Sorry.  I just had to say that.  In fact I’ve been dying to say that.  Bjork.  Mall.  Here goes.  I was at the mall with the spouse trying to see “He’s Just Not That Into You.” despite massive crowds of unruly teenagers and plump people waiting in long lines for a fat laden dinner at Fridays.  I was starting to feel a bit blue about my life, sort of small and suburban, my Saturday night at the mall without even the vaguest desire to see a real film like “Slumdog”.  As I elbowed my way past the masses filling the mall multiplex, there, suddenly, rising out of the crowds was a face I knew.  It was Bjork and her oh so groovy filmaker husband Matthew Barney.  And they were, I believe, going to see “Madea”. Raises it’s own questions but we won’t go there.  In that moment  I felt like a new, cooler, hipper amazing mall going suburban woman. And I had to text every one.  Now here’s where this all starts to connect to what came before.  The texts that came back from my friends were all the same.  Here’s what they said.  ”Is she wearing a swan?”.  I know the fashion critics KILLED her for wearing the swan to the Oscars.  I have to admit I hated it.  Partly because it took quite some time for me to figure out if it was real or not.  But none of us will ever forget that damned bird.  It’s Bjorks bird and even today real swans make me think of her with gratitude that their neck is not wrapped around hers. The point is, she didn’t seem to care what anyone thought and she made her mark.   

 We should all do the same.  I think we’d be happier.  And more memorable.  We’d be our own person instead of “Fabulous at Any Age”.  We’d just plain be fabulous.  Whether wearing sherbet jumpsuits, swans around our necks or swiss cheese textured bathrobes.  And we’d all be much more secure.  See. Don’t you feel empowered.  I know I feel better already.    Now if only the spouse could stop talking about ice cream in such an annoying way.  I’d almost rather he slept with my sister.

Face or Ass

I watched the Academy Awards last night, from bed, and having only seen those fine films nominated in the category of Animation I fell asleep at 9:40, exhausted from a combination of last weeks school vacation and old age.  But I stayed up just long enough to notice one thing.  Robert Downey Jr appears to have had work done.  I’m serious.  His once craggy, drug addicted, naughty boy face is now smooth as my six year olds bottom.  Which brings me to the “Face or Ass” adage.  A wise friend who is both pencil skinny and who had a face lift before she rang half a century, gave me the advice that, at some point, women (and apparently Robert Downey, Jr) must choose between their face and their ass.   I was twenty eight.  I didn’t even begin to get it.  At that age I had a lot more ass than I do now and, now that I think of it,  a lot more face.  I was a puffy, full eyebrowed, unlined version of myself who stared at women configured like Charlotte Rampling and longed for less face, less ass not to mention eyebrows.  It took a few years to figure out that the eyebrow problem was fixable but the ass and face issue continues to plague me.   I just read an interview with Jane Fonda who is past seventy.  I think she looks better than she ever has and she seems to agree.  Apparently she was a bit like me.  All youthful puff and eyebrows.  Her cheeks were apparently so round that some deep Hollywood movie director, understanding the true value of things in life, proposed she get her jaw broken to give her face more definition.  She thought long and hard and opted out of tremendous pain, healing and the possibility of complications, not to mention testifying on any stand, and went for the other chiseling option, aging, which seems to suck fat from the face like a semi collider with an atom.  In her case, it worked.  She looks better than ever.  Or at least I think so.  Her ass looks pretty damned good too so I suspect a bit of doctor intervention on one or the other, but still.  Here’s the question.  Must one choose either face or ass?  Does the fatter the ass mean smoother the skin?  Do four hundred pound gals have the faces of  pre-teens and skinny butted women of a certain age have flesh hanging off their faces like a dress on a Supermodel?  I don’t pretend to know.  I’m skinnier now than I was as a twenty year old.  It’s only because I have a little more discipline and I reject the full case of beer and a pint of Ben and Jerrys as the perfect Saturday night.  My face is a heck of a lot more wrinkled but, somehow, I like it better.  Except for those lines over my lips, the product of  a wicked smoking habit that I still miss but kicked eleven years ago.  I don’t like those because they remind me, every day, of how much I still wish I smoked.  Sort of just kidding.  I look every bit my age.  But I don’t look bad.  Would I look better if I put on ten pounds?  I don’t know.  I have plump friends with no wrinkles and skinny friends with no wrinkles (of course they are either Greek or African American, two groups remarkably exempt from the effects of gravity and time).  I have medium sized friends who have  had their eyes done and it does make them look like they just woke from a long winters nap.  We’re talking full hibernation rested.  I have an acquaintance who was always skinny, never wrinkled and had a face lift even though she said she didn’t.  My friend Mary and I stalked her at a Harry Potter party and came to the conclusion that she was full of shit and that she was pulled tighter than the skin on an African drum and that it just made her look like a fifty year old with a face life.  And something that made her lips look odd.  Phew.  We breathed a sigh of relief The facelift question was answered.  Or at least delayed.  SHE, the woman of the Harry Potter stalking CLEARLY looked worse.  And filled. With something that had not been manufactured at Hogwarts.  Mary , the same Mary, sat with me in stunned disbelief at lunch with another friend who said “You two have had nothing done?  That’s unbelievable.And unwise.” and proceeded to reel off a list of people who’d been getting nipped, tucked and injected since we were fat faced twenty somethings. And we sat there, stretched grins like the sixth graders who discover that everyone is wearing  a training bra and smoking behind the library, but them.  We felt like idiots but calmed slightly when she explained that for HER every eight month regimen of injectables, she was fully anesthetized.  C’mon.  Full anesthesia for COSMETIC SURGERY.  Can you say “complications”.  Humiliation, trust me, even if you are dead.  

I don’t know about this aging thing.  How to do it gracefully and, more importantly,  without tremendous pain and excessive suturing.  I don’t know if I need to get fatter to get rid of the wrinkles or if I need to stay skinny with a bit of a road map traversing the face if the light isn’t just perfect.  And it’s only going to get worse.  But, I don’t want to look like Robert Downey, Jr.  On many levels.  And I do want to look like Jane Fonda.  And I don’t know where to start.

I do know that my friend Jean who’s a beauty expert says that one of the few products she really thinks works is Retin A.  So this weekend I decided to start there.  I ran out and bought some Neutrogena product that had the phrase “wrinkle eliminator” on it.  I don’t believe that for a second but it does contain Jeans Retin A.  And I’m excited.  I can hear Cher singing “If I could turn back time” as I swipe on my “pearl sized drop”.  So, before I hit the injectables and the paralytics not to mention the scalpels and the really big medical bills in a time of recession.  Retin A.  Right on those nice smile lines you see to your left.  Retin A.  And then maybe I can keep both my ass and my face.  It should be possible, right?  And if that doesn’t work, I’m willing to contemplate the Ben and Jerry’s.  And the case of beer.  Every Saturday night.  For medicinal purposes. Only.

I’ve stopped reading the wedding pages

Why do I now find the obituaries so much more interesting than the wedding pages?  My girlhood was devoted to the wedding pages, scanning the brides, picking out the prettiest, who had the most likely to succeed husband, best job, most fabulous parents.  I dreamed of the day that I, too, would be inThe Wedding Pages.  My best friend Connie, a very smart woman who, ironically, became a professor of Womens Studies and was all about being your own self, not a reflection of some mans fantasy, well, the day after her wedding, the first thing we did was race downstairs at the Bed and Breakfast on Cape Cod that had hosted her nups, leaving her spent groom in bed,  to tear open the Wedding Section of the NY Times and,  there she was, complete.  A Times bride.  And a few years later she realized that, in fact, she was a total reflection of her husbands fantasy and a lesbian and she left.  Taking the copy of the Times announcement with her.  My own wedding announcement can be read here.(see press at top of home page)  I liked it. I was traditional, no husband photo (my mother being somewhat old school thought the two shots were just tasteless), just me, in my dress, with my friend CC taking the photo in her back yard, the dappled trees casting nice shadows and hiding the fact that I am so hung over my face is inflated to twice it’s normal size and my hands are shaking too hard to sip iced tea.   Luckily CC was hung over too and did a fine job of covering for both of us.  And I didn’t spill the iced tea on my Vera.

 Let me tell you, these wedding people take their jobs seriously.  When the pretentious fact checker called to check facts I was annoyed that she wouldn’t let me include the much more prestigious school that I had attended but quit.  Quit Junior Year for Chrissake.  But no.  That school she could not mention, but she could mention the two year Associates Degree that I had gotten in acting school.  ACTING SCHOOL.  My god,  even I know there should not be a degree associated with it.  But my elite New England college that turned away four times as many kids as it accepted?  That was an achievement worthy of the Times.  Retaken SAT’s, tough interviews, good grades with the help of Mr. Matthews the ninety year old math tutor in whose kindly but stinky realm I spent every Wednesday of my Junior year in high school trying to master Algebra 2,  letters of reccomendation from obscure alumni that you  meet once at a gathering for someone’s sixtieth anniversary and then had to have coffee with while they patted your hand with their own liver spotted fist, fighting with parents, door slamming, declarations of dropping out, dreams of just saying “yes” to the demanding boyfriend and getting knocked up which would solve everything, maybe, and finally, being invited to join the small elite liberal college crowd.  This achievement was not small and, yet, Miss Fact Checker didn’t care.  Did she not understand that the whole deal is getting in, not staying in?  Then, to add insult to injury,  Miss Fact Checker said that she had to include the fact that my husband’s, and I quote, “previous marriage had ended in divorce.”  I think if a marriage ends in divorce, it should be like not graduating from the prestigious college to which you were accepted, attended and chose not to stay.  My husband did that with his first marriage.  He was accepted, he attended for a time and, frankly, chose not to stay when the sex dried up and the animosity overwhelmed the original urge to marry someone, anyone, who was willing to have sex with the 21 year old him..  So I lose my prestigious college mention and he is forced, FORCED, to mention an incomplete marriage experience rooted in twenty year old sexual needs.  It’s wrong. So I’ve moved to the obits.

The obits tell it like it is.  I suspect, though, thank god, I don’t yet know, NO ONE FACT CHECKS THE OBITS.  There is no snooty, although clearly not bright enough to be employed elsewhere at the newspaper, Miss Fact Checker calling to check on anything because HOW RUDE WOULD THAT BE IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH.  ”Oh, I am sorry for your loss but was Mr. Jones really a member of the Pelham Rotary?” No.  That would be wrong.  So whatever ends up in the Obits is, if nothing else, a reflection of how the dead person wants to see themselves.  Or wanted.  Or how their kids thought they should be seen.  It is also a recitation of life’s work not an announcement that some girl got lucky enough to fool some guy into marrying her and riding that bucking bronco through the land of 50% divorce rates.  No, Obits are about life’s work.  Even if your life’s work was simply having 8 kids and the corresponding 28 grandkids and loving them all.  That’s decent work.  And that is nice.  Unlike the bitches on the wedding pages who only want to make you feel stupid and bad for dropping out of college and moving to New York, having a wild fun life while you waited on tables then getting a cool job, figuring out how to dress,  how not to drink too much every night of the week,  how to talk about politics even when you didn’t know what you were talking about and enabling you to become confident enough to finally find a guy who wasn’t going to treat you like dirt even if he did have a first wife who happens to be mentioned in your wedding announcement.  But I’m not bitter.

Mommys Spelling Words.

My friend Carol’s son is in Jack’s class.  Fifth grade.  Once every two weeks someone forgets their spelling words but it’s not me or Carol.  Yet,  Carol and I end up trading spelling words.  Tonight, Carol and Jen came up with their own collection of spelling words.    They are as follows:

1. Restalyn

2. Recession

3. Mediation

4. Xanax (excellent use of x’s)

5. Boarding school

6. Pilates

7. Low Fat Dry Cappuccino

8. Crows-feet (see 1. restalyn)

8. Saddlebags

9. Arthritis 

10. Alcoholic

And for extra credit, a whole sentence:  My god, is this really my life and how did I get here?

And just briefly, let’s discuss middle aged mothers and their instruments.  Yes, the kids have reached that happy time in life when they take music lessons in school and rent expensive instruments that come in hard, unattractive black cases that double the instruments size and are almost universally too large for any child to carry, unless you happen to have a child built like Hagrid.  Jack, for instance, has chosen the Baritone Horn for his instrument this year.  The Baritone horn is roughly the size of a Smart car and essentially impossible for any skinny fifth grade boy to carry more than eight steps, even with help from friends.  It has, therefore,  just because I can actually lift it, become a version of my purse without any room for lipstick, cash or maxi pads.  People must see me and say “Oh, there goes Jen with her new fashionable Smart car purse…oh, wait, I think it’s her Baritone.”  Just me and my baritone.  An attractive, hot kind of MILF like instrument, isn’t it?  I’m sure all of those dads lingering at pick up spot me and begin to fantasize about Baritione playing woman.  I’ve tried playing it.  Yes, it involves a lot of blowing but we all know that particular act was misnamed.   I console myself with the fact that my friend Nerissa’s purse seems to currently be a cello.  And no one is fantasizing about Yo Yo Ma.

Transgendered Rosa Parks

I just finished my People magazine.  I think we all need to pick up a copy, turn to page 127 and offer some help.  It’s the tale of the self proclaimed “Transgendered Rosa Parks”, a fellow from Oregon named Stu Rasmussen, a popular three term Mayor.  I tried to download the article but it’s from the Feb 16th issue so you’ll have to wait. I have attached a few photos from Stu’s own website for your viewing pleasure. Just so you know, since the photo on the left was taken, Stu has gone red (see bottom image).  Now Stu, after years of struggling with his identity and literally and figuratively hiding in the closet his vast collection of womens clothing finally has come clean.  It began with the Internet which allowed Stu to realize that cross dressing was not just for “freaks and weirdos”, although he never goes on to specify who the Internet indicated was actually cross dressing out there, and has ended with a $4,000 breast implant surgery (which he sweetly refers to as “adopting the twins”), a successful re-election as Mayor despite wearing one of the worst tank tops I’ve ever seen, and a confession followed by complete acceptance from his girlfriend of ten years, Victoria Sage.  Victoria’s only concern was that Stu’s tendancy to dress was a little “va-voom”.  Okay.  Va voom does not begin to describe the “don’t” factors to Stu’s dressing.  Stu dresses like a freak.  I think we need to help the “Transgendered Rosa Parks”.  And not just a little.  Rosa was an elegant little woman, demure but attractive.  The message when you looked at Rosa was always about racial equality.  With Stu, no one thinks Transgendered equality.  You just think, “Oh, my GOD who let him out of the house with that on.”  He’s giving women, cross dressers and transgendered folks a terrible name, as if any of us need more bad publicity.   He needs our help.  So here are my pointers.  Feel free to add your own.

Stu, Artificial red hair NEVER works unless you truly look like Nicole Kidman or, with the right color job, Drew Barrymore.  Red highlights, perhaps a subtle shade of strawberry, but Brenda Starr, a color never seen in the real world red can only be worn by those in possession of the deepest beauty or drawn by cartoonists.  And Stu, I am sorry, but that is not you.  Now, Stu, I think this goes for red tights as well.  Red tights are for toddlers.  And Trannies, but since you’ve taken the dignified step of adopting the “twins” you are officially on the road to joining me and my fellow women, and you need to release the closeted transvestite and embrace the out in the open Renee Richards.  She always looked good.  Do you want to be one of those women that young men spot from a distance, hurry to catch up to because from behind slutty red tights on long legs capped by a skinny butt, and so much red hair, indicate there’s something really hot and potentially available up ahead, only to cruise around the front view and die from a sudden heart arrythmia brought on by shock?  Worse than shock.  Stunned disbelief.  You don’t want that, Stu.  All of us of a certain age FEAR that.  And you should be right there with us.  No, Stu, you need to embrace a look that is quieter, a gentler beauty.  And stop with the cleavage.  You’re sixty.  Cleavage, unless your Helen Mirren(see Bikini post), is not good.  Even if the boobs that create it are brand new, you are not.  Stu, red nail polish calls attention to hands.  Stu, your hands are the size of catchers

 mitts.  Do not call attention to them.  Oh, Stu, I’m sorry to be so harsh.  I’m just trying to help.  You want to be the best half transgendered Mayor who has an accepting girlfriend with a porn star name and two newly purchased breasts who got elected despite wearing red pumps, a demim skirt and a mans face.  Because, as you said in the People article, this is a “Seminal moment”.  Stu, you didn’t actually say “seminal moment”.  Please.  I think Rosa just left her grave.

Todays News

Okay, a couple of interesting things in todays New York Times…there’s a story on the business pages about a woman who’s job is brow shaper.(Click Here) Yes.  Shaper of eyebrows.  Tweezer, waxer, plucker.  Woman who admits freely and comfortably and without a hint of embarrassment that she plucks hair from other peoples forehead and calls it a career.  A career that the New York Times clearly agrees with because she’s in the Business Pages. Now this career woman goes on to tell a tale of rescuing some demanding and spoiled sounding bride to be’s brows on a flight from NY to LA, despite tremendous turbulance, general reluctance and an overwhelming desire to just read People magazine quietly for seven hours(okay, the People part is what I’d want to be doing, the plucker never says that ).   She finally agrees, safely shapes the brides brow without dislodging an eye and the plucker and the pluckee arrive at the gate where they are met by the brides husband to be.  With horror, the shaper realizes, shhhh, she knows him and that they share a terrible secret.  She has in fact shaped his eyebrows TOO but like any good eyebrow shaper or prostitute aside from Ashley Dupre,  she would never reveal such a tragic and damaging flaw and pretends she’s never met him.  He, like any caught John or man with shaped eyebrows, does the same and the petulant bride, unfortunately will marry a man who’s eyebrows she hardly knows.  Now that is a secret you would want to keep.  My god, to have a spouse who shapes his eyebrows.  It’s worse than visiting pole dancers, running up secret bank accounts or having sex with goats, in the barn or not.  Men who shape their eyebrows.  If I ever found out that Rich did that, I don’t know how we’d survive.  I struggle with Rich’s recent discovery of hair gel and have always wondered if his fascination with hockey hides an inner homo-eroticism.  I can relax, however, in the knowledge that his greying eyebrows are clearly without shape and rivaled in unruliness only by his grey and increasing nose hair.

Oh, and the second story?  That one is about a book that, among many other interesting numerological points,  reveals that the average number of feet on people in the world is, Yes, LESS THAN TWO.  That’s right.  If averaged together, all of us in true “We Are the World” fashion singing softly and holding hands while circling the globe and swaying in our oneness, our number of feet would be less than two.  (Click Here)  Sip your coffee and ponder that.  And, next time, let’s chat about the mother of octuplets with six children already at home.  Bet you a million bucks she NEVER, EVER gets HER brows shaped again.

Luke

A quick tale.  Last week my six year old woke up, fully expecting a snow day.  The overly excited weather people had been doing their usual meteorological frothing about the storm headed our way.  When it, not surprisingly, didn’t pan out and little Luke,at six thirty am,  raised his head from his bed and asked “Mom, do we have school?”, he was crushed by the answer “yes.”  Luke pulled his sheets over his head and settled into a still little sad ball of boy. Two seconds later he popped his head back up, looked at me very seriously and said “Shoot, Mom, I won’t be able to attend school today.   I do believe I broke my leg during the night.”

Visions of Harvard dance from my head…..