I received the photo at the left from my friend Bill in the context of Allure magazines anti-aging issue. He knows how opposed to aging I am. Now, as is obvious from the picture, Bill is a guy who clearly just wants me to feel good about myself. This is the same Bill who pointed out that Osama bin Laden and I share a birthday. Ahhh. Good friends. Well, this pic features forty three year old Cindy Crawford wearing last nights dessert. It’s quite a photo. And I certainly know how that goes, we all do. Kids get a little crazy, hopped up on sugar, food starts to fly, everyone’s having fun, clothes come off, out comes the digital camera . And bango. A potential Christmas card photo. It happens here at least once a month. As Bill kindly pointed out, whatever Cindy is currently using for anti-aging products, they do, indeed, appear to be working although it’s a bit hard to see through the coating of last nights dessert. (note: her head is cut off because of both my incompetence at uploading anything AND does anyone ever really care about her face when dessert is on the rest of her? It looks like whipped cream and maybe some lemon meringue? I’m getting downright hungry. ) Then, today, the paper features Valerie Bertinelli, 48, in her bathing suit. Valerie looks great too although why everyone seems to be so shocked she looks good is beyond me. Maybe it’s because she did go through that phase when something went south with Eddie Van Halen and to kill the pain of a declining marriage, she picked fast food over alcohol and drugs. 
What the hell’s wrong with that. But the pics of all these fabulous women in my age group half naked got me rethinking my Christmas card policy. Every year, usually at the height of summer tans, I get my four kids all dolled up, or at least make them wash the chocolate off the edges of their mouths and we pose for a Christmas card photo. They always look cute, the spouse has on a clean shirt and a game, “I’ll do this for you” kind of smile. And I look fabulous. Which is really the point of a family Christmas card anyway. Who really gives a damn what your kids look like. Kids are kids and your kids photos are really only interesting to two people. You and your spouse. And maybe your parents if they don’t have something more interesting to think about. The spouse is male and only changes by greying or slight weight fluctuations. But you, now that’s where everyone is looking. How’s she holding up, they wonder? Is she having work done? Is that arm flab I see? Kinda seems to be letting herself go. What is she wearing? Did she think hair that short would be flattering? I know that’s how it works. Particularly when you send the card to the families of old boyfriends. The wives spend hours with a magnifying glass bent over your card. I’m sure of it. Which is why I’m now proposing that the family holiday card should actually be just a picture of me. Me looking really good. Well lit, no sign of the hours of physical prep that went in to the shot, the hair coloring and facials nor the retouching that took out all smile lines and age spots. Heck, me naked if dessert was really good that night. I think it should just be me. Wind in my hair, a sly happy smile on my face. A look that says “I know that time is passing, but I’m enjoying every minute.” A photo that doesn’t feature the double chin that appears from a certain angle or the muffin tops at the upper edge of your jeans. OR the crease between your eyes when you’re discussing something you care about. It will not feature you shrieking at the kids or berating the spouse. It will not be from behind because, as we all know from Star Magazine, even twenty year olds have cellulite in a certain light. It won’t be the Jamie Lee Curtis in More Magazine. Remember that one? Jamie Lee, in her underwear with no
retouching or special lighting. Heck, she didn’t even suck in her belly. And while I applaud the sentiment and the bravery, it should not, I repeat, NOT be her Christmas card. No, we all want the Valerie Bertinelli card. She, by the way, credits her new found shape to yoga. Just so you know, I think it’s a multitude of down dogs combined with some heavy retouching. Not that I’m cynical. So, go for the Valerie Bertinelli card. I. personally think the Cindy Crawford card is just too much. Although I’m sure my friend Bill would disagree. You want your Christmas picture to say happy and satisfied with life not messy at the table while eating dessert nude. Hmmm. Although, here’s an idea. How bout a Valerie Bertinelli for friends and family. And then a Cindy Crawford for old boyfriends and husbands ex wives. Maybe that’s it. Two cards. To cover everything.
Okay, so I need some advice. Until last night we were an easy family, four healthy reasonably well behaved kids, five healthy reasonably well behaved pets, two healthy reasonably well behaved parents. And then last night all hell broke loose. I discovered our gerbils were tramps. I’m devastated. It never occurred to me that creatures so sweet and furry could be living double lives. And believe me when I say this, there was no sign of what was really going on. They chewed their nuts and seeds looking up at me with little wrinkled noses and wise brown eyes. They let me occasionally stroke them while cage cleaning. They were happy creatures despite living their lives in a glass box. Happy with their family, happy with their nuts and seeds, happy methodically knawing their wood houses to nothing, one after another, something I thought that was just gerbil behavior. Not a sign of something more. Who knew? Heck, they’d even go nose to nose with the cats through the glass from time to time, sniffing at the cats wet noses pressed against the glass causing the cats to nearly have strokes from excitement and confusion. It seemed like life with Whiskers and Muffin was as it should be. Whiskers and Muffin, two of the cutest girl gerbils a pet store could ever sell you. And getting them was a difficult decision. I’m not a rodent fan. And Rich actually lets out girly screams when he sees a mouse cross our floor (despite his 6′3″ height and the threat of me laughing for three weeks) but we liked these girls. And the pet store owner assured us that these two girls would always get along. That girls were the right choice. And until last night, everything was perfect. Here’s what happened. At 9:30pm Jack and his best friend Noah were climbing into their sleeping bags for a sleepover, Luke was almost asleep in his own little warm bed, Clay (my stepson) was watching TV, Rich and I were going to climb into bed towatch some version of CSI or Law and Order or some crime show where someone has died a horrible violent death, till the red wine I drank with Heidi on the porch would kick in and I would begin snoring. It’s our ritual, at least the red wine and snoring part. Suddenly Jack began screaming. ”Mom, Come quick. Something so horrid is coming out of Muffins butt. Please, I beg you. Come quickly. ” I raced downstairs, more curious than anything. Noah and Jack were huddled around the gerbil cage, expressions of something between disgust and amusement on their soft ten year old faces. Remember, they are ten. Anything involving butts results in some sort of pleasure even if it’s profoundly disgusting. And, you guessed it, something WAS coming out of Muffin, and although it was not coming out of her butt, it sure looked like it was. IT was a baby. And there were what appeared to be eighteen more lying around the cage. And Muffin and Whiskers were darting around frantically trying not to appear guilty. ”Who us, it wasn’t us. Now just move on family. Leave us alone.Leave us to our seeds and our bedding and our house eating. We don’t know anything about those small pink things with waving arms and legs lying all over our cage.” Little guilty rodent eyes darting to and fro. Guilt apparent in every whisker shake. They refused to meet my eyes. How did this happen I wondered? How was it that, without any inkling, I had suddenly become the great grandmother to eighteen hairless pink things that might be in danger of being eaten by their mother. How had I become at great grandmother at 48, period. Terribly white trash of me. And more importantly, how on earth did those carefully pet store sexed gerbil girls manage to sneak out on dates and get knocked up? Who the hell was responsible for this nightmare. And was he going to come forward and take responsibility for his mistake? Make sure these children had a father to look up to, to buy them seeds and houses to eat? I wanted to weep. Where had I fallen down on the pet parenting job. Was I too trusting? Did I ignore the signs that the cage lid was not too heavy. How was I going to explain this bad behavior to the actual children who aren’t pink and have hair to ensure that they don’t follow suit. I scanned the cage quickly for signs, amidst the writhing jelly bean sized offspring of these dangerous liasons. Any thing. Something that I had missed in my day to day running around that is parenting, grandparenting, and, now great grandparenting. What was I looking for? I don’t know. A slightly slutty gerbil mini skirt peeking out from under the eaten house, some carefully hidden gerbil eyeliner, a tiny gerbil cel phone with signs of excessive texting, heck, a crowbar to raise the cage lid? Why had they done it? Hadn’t we given them every thing they ever needed except for that one time the water ran out and I didn’t notice for four days? How had they done it? And more importantly, this question flooded my overwhelmed brain, how had they done it without being eaten by the cats who wait every day for just such an opportunity. I laughed at the cats as they sat by the cage waiting but apparently they knew something I didn’t. This kind of bad behavior indicates a craftiness beyond my comprehension. I continued to stare at the cage full of writing pink hairless offspring in dumbfounded silence thinking what all of you are thinking. ”Wow, are gerbils one of those freak creatures that eat their young and, if so, how the hell am I going to explain that to the sensitive six year old?” And then the children started asking the very questions I feared most.”Mom, how did this happen?” ”Mom, does this mean Muffin and Whiskers are lesbians?” ”Mom, why do babies come out of butts?” “Mom, if we keep having babies and sell them, can we keep the money?” ”Mom, can we keep them all?”
I’m going to go for a jog now. The pet store doesn’t open until ten so I need to do something to calm down until I can talk to people who might be able to help. I’m thinking of sending Muffin and Whiskers to Noah’s parents who are shrinks. Maybe they can figure out where this acting out came from. What did I do wrong. How could this happen in MY house. And what the hell am I going to do with eighteen gerbils. Oh my god. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. Or, if you want a gerbil…..
Okay, I need to start by apologizing for my financial rant from the other day. It was one of those mornings where the oppressiveness of our financial situation, both personal and national, overwhelmed me. The concern over unpaid bills and the future for my children got the better of me. That, and the fact that some twenty year old Glamazon had left a script in our mailbox for my husband to read. And he’s an accountant. Okay, he’s not an accountant, he is in the entertainment business, but not the end that involves script reading. In the fifteen years we’ve been together I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him read a script. Never, ever. And now, with the financial world tumbling around our ears, he’s doing some script guidance for hot twenty year old production assistants. How, you ask, do I know she’s hot, having only discovered the script, not the girl, in our mailbox. Well, because I saw her photo on my husbands Facebook page. What, you gasp. Your husband has a Facebook page? Exactly. So I started to rant about the economy because it was easier than having a knock down drag out with the spouse although we got there eventually.
Which brings me to todays topic HOW NOT TO LOOK OLD. For obvious reasons I’m somewhat concerned, or, perhaps, obsessed with staying young. Like, really young. That was the subject of a Time Magazine article from a few weeks ago. The article was pointed out to me by my friend Christina who called howling with laughter while waiting at the neurologists with her husband wh’d been experiencing some scary neurological symptoms. How, you ask, could some one call from the neurologists laughing while her husband is experiencing scary neurological symptom? Did you read my opening paragraph?
The article discusses a recently released study by some doctors at Case Western who took a look at a bunch of photos of identical twins to see how they were aging. They came to conclusions, some of which seem obvious and some of which confuse me. I’ll begin with my concern about the two photos at the beginning of the article. Two sisters, side by side. One looks good, the other, not so much. But here’s my question. The one who looks good has a sly sweet smile, some pink in her cheeks, a light in her eyes. I look at her and wonder, maybe she really does look younger in real life. Or maybe she’s a woman who, just before they snapped the shot, had a nice glass of a red wine with a good friend (thus the pink in the cheeks)and had, immediately afterward , been pinched on the bottom by the UPS man delivering her package from Victorias Secret(both resulting in the sly smile). Her sister on the other hand looks at bit scary. Downturned mouth, sagging cheeks, a deadness behind her eyes. But here’s what I wonder. What was going on in her life that day? Was she jealous her sister had gotten the pinch and the thong? Had she given up wine for Lent? Had she been at the neurologist waiting for bad news or good news about her husband? Or perhaps a five foot ten, twenty year old had just left a script for her husband in her mailbox. I don’t know? I’m just saying….
Let’s talk about what the Case Western docs discovered. Okay the first one is shocking. No smoking. Duh. Smoking in your dreams, imagining you are smoking, pantomiming you are smoking or using your straw from your drink as a cigarette are okay. But no real smoking. It’s power to age trumps the happiness factor you get from doing it. Sunscreen. Use it. Although I always think a tan makes someone look younger? And then there’s this astute observation. Fatter people look younger. At least from the neck up (see Face or Ass blog). Therein lies the rub. Apparently a little fat rounding out those cheeks and naturally filling those wrinkles helps. BUT your ass will suffer. There will be no Victoria Secret deliveries by UPS men for you because they don’t make thongs in your new size. And no pinches from the UPS man because, truth be told, your ass will be too scary. And everyone will say “Too bad, she has such a pretty face.” And then won’t understand when you start screaming in confusion. Face or Ass. It’s a regular Sophies choice.
But the final point of this study made me smile. It made me think of my friend Susanna who just did the ultimate in Spring Cleaning. She unloaded approximately 150 pounds of useless material that had been lingering around her house for, oh, 24 years or so. I don’t know how to best describe what she got rid of so for ease’s sake, I’ll call it her husband. Now Susanna looks better than she has in years. Soft, rested, calm. And without an ounce of additional fat on her body but a fathead excised from her life. Which is what they discovered in the study. No husband is better than a less than great one. Divorce ages you but getting rid of a bad husband will make you younger. And never marrying at all, well, ask Christina how funny that news was. Never marry, and Christina and I both believe we’re reading this important study properly, your face will remain as soft as a baby’s bottom and you can continue leaving scripts in married men’s mailboxes until you’re seventy and you’ll still piss off their wives.
Now just to clarify a few things here. Christina’s husband did not have a horrible neurological problem. And she is, I must admit, thrilled about that. And my husband is a sweet, funny fellow who only has eyes for me. And I’m sure that he would offer to script read for anyone, even young men with coke bottle glasses who spit when they talk and women with mange who haven’t bathed in six weeks, or old people in an advanced state of dementia who write scripts that don’t have any real words, just clumps of letters or small animals who suddenly find their voice. He would script read for anyone. It just so happens that, in all his years in television, the first person who asked was twenty four, five ten, with a perfect set of bow lips framed by waist length un-dyed blonde hair and a body that seems to be unwilling to not only quit but is something of a workaholic. Yes, he’ll read your script. Just don’t leave it in my mailbox. I’m a little tense these days.
Okay, goddamnit. I am pissed off. I’m so pissed off because I can’t be funny. I’m just too pissed off. I’m pissed off at Bernie Madoff’s droopy face on the cover of every US paper. Oh, Bernie’s sad. Poor Bernie. Bernie doesn’t look good. Bummer about the one room cell with no windows, Bernie.
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It’s my birthday today. ”Which birthday”, you politely ask? As I told my children this morning, “4 plus 8, you do the math”. The answer twelve confused them but it was fine by me. I considered it a teachable moment.
My friend Bill just Facebooked me the fact that I share a birthday with Osama bin Laden. Wow, as I told him, great. I had always been disappointed to have missed Hitlers birthday by a month and ten days. Why am I telling you all this? Well, like all birthdays past the age of those cakes that had real nude Barbie in the middle sporting frosting skirts and bodices, this one is more about getting older than getting loot and eating sweets. And when you have to do the dishes on your day of birth, and mediate fights between children and have your own fight with your spouse…I’ll just stop there. Now that I think of it, there was always something racy about the idea that your birthday cake was housing a naked girl. Even if she did smell like plastic.
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Last week, while in bed with an odd little virus, I happened upon a commercial that fascinated me. It came up, I think, between a rerun of “Pretty Woman” and my switching to the Food Channel. (Note: as you can see, the virus was not necessarily a bad thing. When was the last time you watched “Pretty Woman”? It holds up as an excellent tale of the salvation of a hooker with no apparent venereal disease or drug problem and really good hair). So this commercial features an attractive woman about seventy in line at the supermarket, perfectly turned out, nice gold jewelry, soft sweet face, hair neatly coiffed but there’s something behind her eyes. They shift nervously from side to side, head tilting awkwardly. She looks behind her. She looks forward. She drums her lovely senior fingers. Wait, is she shoplifting? Is she having a seizure? Something petit mal-ish, nothing with froth? Is she checking out the hot senior fox in the next checkout aisle? NO, she is dying of embarrassment because she is, yes, purchasing DEPENDS. Now, it’s not that buying DEPENDS is something I’m looking forward to. And I’m pretty sure they are somewhere in my future, God willing, I live long enough. Incontinence seems to be, yes, sorry to say it, universal after a certain length of life in the land of gravitational pull. But what followed the lovely Senior in her truly senior moment is an ad for a company that will save the public humiliation of purchasing Depends by delivering them to your home in “plain brown wrapping”. My god, what a service. And what a waste. I can see being embarrassed buying Depends if you’re a twenty something who wears them while getting off on pictures of Pamela Anderson dressed as a nurse? But if you wet your pants and you’re old then you should be proud of doing something about it rather than just, er, wetting your pants. But, okay, so you don’t want the world to know that one good giggle, one really sweet joke will bring on a flood of humiliating proportions, devastating once you can stop laughing. I understand. You don’t want the boy at the checkout counter to turn red and avoid your eyes the way he has for your entire life since you were sixteen and bought your first box of Maxi Pads. Even though he’s now eighty and probably wetting himself too. Again, total understanding. But as far as I could tell from the ad, the ONLY thing that they deliver in plain brown wrappers are products for elderly pant wetters. And I think they are missing the forest for the trees. Think of the things they could be delivering. Just from a small business standpoint in this time of economic downturn. Small businesses need to expand and diversify, and I can only assume that this particular brown paper wrapper business is relatively small given the limited nature of services provided and the very cheap quality of their commercial even though the actress was quite gifted at looking like she might piddle her pants. So if the plain brown wrapper company were to look to the future with a bold and decisive move and expand their horizons, look beyond the elderly, to oh, say, people my age…which is to say, not quite elderly, how huge could their business be? The possibilities are endless. Brown paper wrapped red wine on Friday afternoons. Bottles of Vodka on really bad days. Brown paper wrapped Xanax. Brown paper wrapped syringes filled with botox delivered by doctors dressed as UPS men. Brown paper wrapped toenail fungus medicine and yeast infection cream and metamucil. Why not prunes? Prunes are embarrassing. Brown paper wrapped therapists, only because they’d probably like being wrapped. Brown paper wrapped pints of Haagen Dazs and Ben and Jerry’s and extra large Heath bars. Brown paper wrapped copies of People Magazine and Okay and Lucky and any other literature you hide under couch pillows. I can’t imagine how they would wrap hot young building contractors or personal trainers but it’s a thought. You see what I’m getting at. The possibilities are seemingly endless. Brown paper wrapped steaks for vegans and beers for teetotalers. Every Girls Gone Wild movie ever made. Brown paper. If you skew slightly younger, you can wrap everything from clothes that you paid too much for and come pre ripped to Jonas Brothers CDs and Proactiv acne medicine. I’m telling you, I could go on and on. The Brown Paper Wrapper Company, We’re Sweet and Discreet. We Wrap It, You Slap it. We Slink It, You Drink It. Not to toot my own horn, but I think I’m on to something here. And that way, the Brown Paper Wrap Company can thrive and grow and never, ever seek government bailout money. Although, I suppose that if Depends were the topic of a government hearing, I’d watch.