Jen Laird White

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, 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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.