Okay, so here’s a blog about something I hope you never have to deal with.  The Salem Witch Trial aspect of the Swine flu.  And you thought those nice Puritans in Salem were hysterical.  Swine Flu.  The potential pandemic or as I like to call it THE PIGDEMIC.  Or the Pig Panic.  Or how bout, It’s Just A Slow News Week?  Here’s the deal. My sister and her baby went to Mexico for a conference.  You know where this is going.  Had fun.  Drank cool drinks on the beach, ate okay Mexican food and thought they had really dodged a Mexican bullet when they experienced no gastrointestinal distress.  Wrong. Big time.  Came home.  Got respiratory infections.  Spent lots of time with us because my sister is a single parent,  while baby spewed boogers and received love.  Read hysterical newspapers on Sunday.  Called doctor.  And life as we knew it ended.  All of us, healthy or not, and, trust me, we were all really, really healthy except my mild case of PMS and the jury is still out on whether that counts as illness, ended up in the vortex of swine flu.  Haz-mat teams, being forbidden from attending school due to contact with possibly infected person and the hysteria that might result should other parents discover that we had handled a baby who’d been to Mexico and had a cold.  So my sister and I have spent the last few days trying to entertain three healthy boys and a baby recovering from a cold without having any other human contact or going to any other public place.  It’s been great. I’m thinking of asking the Haz-mat teams to come back just to mediate fights.

Here’s what I think.  I was a longtime member of “The Media”.  I was pretty successful in my day.  I worked with fine journalists like Charles Kuralt and Connie Chung and then I ended up on TV trying to continue their tradition.  I’m not blaming folks like them.  But I do think the hysteria starts with the newsfolk and has much to do with what else is going on in the world.  For instance, remember West Nile Virus.  Probably just barely.  Every year we would hear about the deadly West Nile Virus and there would be spraying of toxic chemicals, predicted horrible death possibilities and terror when you found a dead bird in your gutter.  No more flinging of dead birds into the trash after closely examining them just out of macabre interest and fascination with being up close to such a pretty thing, even dead, when they are usually in the sky.  No, suddenly every dead bird was an issue for the health department, even those with cat fang marks in their heads.  You just never know, people would say.  And do YOU want to die of West Nile?  And then 9/11 happened.  Now September Eleventhwas real news.  Deeply tragic real news.  News that required all news people work long hours on a REAL story that, like all REAL news stories,  was terrifying and full of actual grief.  And you know what’s funny?  Since 9/11 we have never heard another story about West Nile.  Or at least I haven’t.  My friend Gina’s son is a teenager and like all teenaged boys, he had a really naughty idea one day. He and some friends discovered a dead opossum while walking home from school.  Like any teenage boy I can think of, they decided it would be hysterically funny to hang the dead possum by it’s tail from an overpass onto the roadway below.  I know.  Stupid.  But not surprising from a demographic who’s only goal in life is to have some sort of skin to skin contact with a teenaged girl, fart the loudest in their posse, preferably not in front of the teenaged girl,  and eat as much as can possibly be consumed by any human, ideally from a mixing bowl.  Yes, a few cars hit the poor departed possum frozen in full rigor mortis, screeched to a stop, one broke a side mirror.  Chaos, but no one was hurt.  The kids were stunned at the pandemonium they caused and ran but because they were decent kids, came back to make sure everything was okay.  Got arrested.  Cops laughed.  They were headed for a slap on the hand BUT the woman who’s side mirror they had lopped off was a reporter for a local news station and it was a VEEERRRRYYYY slow news period.  So what do you think happened?  Well, by the next morning, news organizations AROUND THE WORLD were reporting a roving band of teenage boys who had executed an innocent(if anything that bizarre looking can ever truly be innocent)opossum and thrown it, like the now infamous frozen turkey incident, at unsuspecting cars, hoping to do grievous harm to both the drivers and the poor possum.  The family got hate mail, animal rights people demanded death for the teens, the judge, succumbing to public pressure hit the kids with a felony.  That they will have for the rest of their lives.  

Slow news days are going to ruin our lives.  And hysteria will kill you faster than swine flu or West Nile.  Last year I had an unsettling event in my life.  After a series of routine tests, a very young and somewhat hysterical doctor diagnosed me with a heart condition that would kill me quickly and ruin my life before it did.  Let’s just say I became somewhat hysterical, the doctors were somewhat hysterical, my normally level headed spouse became hysterical, my sister and her angrily divorcing spouse became, for just my period of near death, remarkably civil and hysterical, my friends, hysterical, my parents, hysterical.  Even the pets seemed off.  There was so much hysteria every where that I looked that I filled a prescription for Xanax and never actually took one.  Just carried it with my in case the hysteria threatened to overwhelm.  But in the midst of it all, two of my friends, both gifted doctors, didn’t display one bit of hysteria and spent a lot of time on the phone with me talking me off ledges until we could find the right doctor to help me.  We did find her (just so you know, her name is Evelyn Horn and she is a spectacular cardiologist at Weill Cornell).  She sat me down in her office and spent half an hour on my chest with her stethescope after which she looked up and said something like this…”Okay, you are not dying.  You’ve got a problem but I think as long as we take care of you properly, you can live to be 102.”  And I was no longer hysterical.  I think that period of time shaved years off my 102 life span and I’ll probably only make it to 95 but it also taught me a really important lesson.  Hysteria is never helpful.  It’s just hysterical.  

We need to all calm down.  Deep breaths.  Be practical but not fearful.  Perhaps always on alert for opossums hanging from overpasses and never drinking the water in Mexico (c’mon, it’s just common sense) but other than that, go back to looking at dead birds in your yard, eat all the pork you feel like and don’t be afraid just because the media tells you to.  My friend Alanna Levine, a lovely, smart and most importantly CALM, doctor who is all over TV all the time (www.alannalevinemd.com) came up with a few pointers for getting through this all with practicality.  Here they are:

From: Alanna Levine <alannalevine@me.com>

Date: May 1, 2009 11:17:02 AM EDT

To: Jen White <jen1515@verizon.net>

Subject: Swine Story-let me know if you want more or different info…xox

General Swine Flu Facts:

1.  The information is changing hour to hour so what is true now, may not be true tomorrow-check www.cdc.gov for the latest information.

2.  There is a big difference between a virus that is very contagious (spreads easily) and a virulent (causes severe disease) one.  On a personal level, I would be more concerned with virulence.

3.  Even if you received a flu shot/mist this year, you will not be protected against swine flu-the CDC is developing a different vaccine for H1N1 virus.

4.  H1N1 virus is responsive to antiviral drugs like Tamiflu and Relenza.

What should we as individuals do?

1.  Use common sense!  Think of it like seasonal flu and act in the same way you would during flu season.

2.  Wash you hands frequently-hand sanitizer is okay if you don’t have access to water.

3.  Eat well and get enough sleep.

4.  Encourage people who don’t feel well to stay home.

5.  Sneeze or cough into a tissue and wash hands afterwards.

6.  In work and school environments, clean frequently touched surfaces (like you ordinarily should)-viruses can live for 2 hours or longer on surfaces.

7.  Do NOT take anti-viral medication prophylactically unless you have a special circumstance and it’s after consultation with your physician.

8.  Avoid non-essential travel to Mexico.

I’m going to add that I’m unclear what any essential travel to Mexico might be.  But Alanna forgot the most important tip of all.  DO NOT READ A NEWSPAPER OR WATCH TV UNTIL I TELL YOU THAT THE SWINE FLU TERRORIZING IS OVER.  And I read the papers this morning.  I think they’re getting bored and by next week we’ll be on to something else. 

My friend Jonathan’s mother died Friday and we went to the calling hours yesterday.  She was quite old and had been terribly sick for sometime so, while it was sad for the family, it was not devastating.  My spouse and I took turns at the calling hours at a very fancy New York city funeral parlor.  We took turns because I noted in the Times that there would be a viewing and I didn’t think that my kids were ready for real life dead bodies that had not been killed by aliens but just by old age.  I went in first and Rich wandered Madison Avenue with the boys and bought them expensive candy.  Then Rich went in and I sat with the boys in the sun on a swank storefront ledge and taught them how to identify facelifts vs injectables.  They were quite good at it by the time we headed home although the six year old could really only spot a bad lift not an artful one and the ten year old felt that most women were walking too fast to really assess the likelihood of Botox assistance.

I had only met Jonathans mother after she had suffered strokes and other debilitating illnesses but I knew people who had known her when she was younger and they always cited her great beauty.  And she looked pretty darned good in the open casket.  Although not nearly as good as she did in the pictures of her glowing with life.  And, as I glanced at her, not really ever having been comfortable with the open casket thing, some thing struck me. She was wearing a Chanel suit.  Now I have never actually coveted a Chanel suit but I do know what they cost.   Jonathans  mother was going into the ground swathed in $5,000 or so of yellow, orange and cream Chanel suiting that, even if sold on ebay, could have fed a family for several months.  And it would, once deposited in the ground, no matter how nice the casket was(and it was a very nice one) disappear in a blur of whatever happens once a human is boxed and begins it’s return to the dust.  I know this seems callous but Jonathans wife, my friend Jane, made the same point.  She also pointed out that the deceased was a very clear-eyed, generous and practical woman who would NEVER want to waste a perfectly good Chanel suit by burying it underground to return to dust.  Particularly since the Bible never, ever mentions ashes to ashes, Chanel to dust.  And this got me thinking again about an issue that has bothered me.  What is the right thing to wear to your own funeral and how do you make sure that your wishes are followed? 

One of my best friends from childhood died at 41.  She had been diagnosed with bone cancer when we were 16 but had lived an amazing life minus a leg, eventually minus a lung and plagued by endless amounts of medical interference, dealing with it all by getting on with her fabulous life. She became a renowned poet, travelled the world dragging her unwieldy prosthesis and buckets of pills and developed an incredible sense of style that involved black, drapey architectural clothing with perfect jewelry accents.  She had strayed far from her working class overtly religious parents and simple roots and had become a woman of her own making, of taste, of culture, of the world and not, loudly NOT,  of any sort of religion.  She and I often laughed about the land of fashion “Don’ts” we grew up in.  So, after years of too much medical meddling, Micheles heart just plain gave out when she hit forty one, while sitting alone in a chair reading a book.  No one saw it coming.  I was asked to give the eulogy at her funeral and showed up in our home town, devastated with grief, new baby and toddler in tow and a wicked stomach flu.  My parents met me, we had a cry and they took the kids so that I could go to calling hours.  And there, laid out in a box, was the most horrifying sight I could imagine.  My dear, dear friend. Dead.  But worse than dead, this beloved fashion conscious woman I loved, she was dead and wearing a purple polyester dress, pink lipstick and her hands were wrapped in rosary beads.  I didn’t know what to do.  First of all, I realized then and there that there was NO afterlife because if there was Michele would have come back, I guarantee, just long enough and while no one was looking because she didn’t like to upset people, to fling the rosary beads across the room.  And purple and pink.  Polyester.  It had never occurred to us that she was going to die.  She’d fought so long and hard and beaten every odd that I think we thought we’d have her forever.  Sure she had a DNR in place for surgeries and other medical emergencies that were her life.  She’d done that years before.  But she had never contemplated, really, what might happen if she died and so she had issued no directives for post death fashion.  Here she was, one of the most Audrey Hepburn-esque women I know, lying in a box, swathed in polyester in a tone that brought out the yellow in her skin and pink lipstick that made her look, well, dead.  “I am so sorry” I whispered.  “I don’t know how to help you out of this mess.”  And it was then that I began to think about what to wear when you’re dead, imagining the laugh that she and I would have had over this, and the directives you need to leave in place to ensure that well meaning parents or color blind spouses don’t pick their favorite thing, that very thing you would not be caught dead in.  Literally.  I have always said, forget the open casket unless I look really good but my experience is that that is unlikely.  But I think we should all think about this, those of us who care about our appearances and like to wear attractive clothes.  What do we want to go out in?  And I mean, really OUT.  What message do we want to send.  Some things seem clear.  No dead cleavage.  Or mini skirts.  Although if your legs were REALLY good there might be an exception.  Keep the jewelery for the kids, grandkids, daughters, daughter in laws.  Do NOT put expensive jewels in the ground to exist with the worms.  We are NOT ancient Egyptians.  I mean, can you imagine, post death, having the family dog killed to go to eternal rest with dad?  Have the same attitude toward jewels.  The ancient Egyptians were simple.  We are not.  Never let the funeral parlor do your makeup.  My GOD.  The only people they have ever given a make-over to are dead.  And they got their training at undertaker school.  Which is a much lower level than Cosmetology School.  Don’t do it.  I don’t know the alternatives but a plain scrubbed face would be better than the Undertaker look.  Even if he is called the Bobbie Brown of Undertaking.  I say skip shoes.  They only open the box halfway.  I say, heck, skip underwear.  Right?!  Particularly your really good French underwear.  Although it’s not like you’re going to hand it down to your grandkids?

I’m not saying you have to do these things.  I’m not even saying that, once you’re dead, anyone will let you.  Or certainly that you’ll care.  I am, however, suggesting you give it a shot and leave an approved wardrobe options list, or a DNDB directive (Do Not Dress Badly) somewhere prominently displayed just in case (buses move fast and without notice).  It’s never too early to contemplate and even in the end, it would be nice to be in control and to look good.  My husband still remembers that his father was wearing makeup in his casket.  My husbands father was a tough guy from the mean streets of Pittsburgh who would sooner beat to death a man wearing makeup.  And how did he go out?  See what I mean.  Looking like he was about to burst into a refrain of “I Feel Pretty”. The dead are, yes, dead, but they should have some dignity.  Who knows whether they are clinging to the ceiling staring down in horror at everything that’s happening to them.  We need to acknowledge that.  And acknowledge that it will one day be a part of our life and one for which we should be prepared.  And well dressed.

And that brings me to my other idea.  My friend Christina has recently been bothered by dreams about all these people in her life who died young.  Her uncle, her dad, some other folks.  I know other people who have those dreams, too.  My husband often dreams of his father, sans makeup, of course.  My mother dreams of her parents.  I sometimes wake up and realize I dreamt that Michele was weeding my garden, something she often did.  It is as though these people are reaching back to remind you they are there.  Just trying to get in touch.  Find out where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to.  And that’s when it struck me.  Facebook for the dead.  Think about it.

I know that things have been silent here for  a week or so.  I’ve been thinking deep thoughts about Vermont’s very impressive gay marriage legislation and New Yorks attempts to follow suit.  Then came the Easter break.  More deep thinking about Passover and Easter and how Elijah manages to drink the wine and Jesus manages to do the rising trick and the Easter Bunny gets into my house without the dog barking.  But now I’m back to deep thoughts on gay marriage.  We spent Easter at my parents house and Dad and I were doing dishes one day.  We were having a nice discussion about the very topic of gay marriage.  And during this discussion, I realized that many gay people seeking marriage might not be aware of the Marital Point System.  The MPS.  It’s a complex system, far beyond reform of the US banking system, Earned Run Averages,  or even conversion from Celsius to Farenheit.  It is particularly complicated because it is a system with no clear rules or guidelines but a clear understanding by all who have chosen to do the marriage thing, be it City Hall, Las Vegas or somewhere decorated in ubiquitous white ribbons and baby’s breath.  It is like a secret handshake or x-ray vision glasses that only begin to work once the words “I Do” are uttered.  It seems to be universal in every language and culture although varying to some degree for instance in places like Afghanistan where women do not, in fact, get any points for anything and should consider themselves lucky not to have their husbands stone them to death for washing their white sox with a red burqa.  For some unknown and, as yet, unresearched reason, in Western culture, women seem to know the MPS scoring system before their spouses.  It may even begin with the engagement ring, an excellent way to garner early, premarital MPS points.  The spouses seem to become aware of the system much later, around eight to ten months into marriage, a change reflected by perplexed expressions and a slight look of fear in their eyes as if to say, “I don’t know what’s happening here, but it feels like this perfectly nice day has gone South rather quickly”.  After a couple of bouts of silent treatment or loud stomping through the house, most males figure it out.  The point system for males seems to be underdeveloped compared to their spouses but many males go through a slight improvement curve for the first year or two when they try, yes they really try.   After this period of effort male scores seem to plummet to be replaced by hostility and anger and female scores and sex drives become stagnant except  after weddings or any other occasions involving martinis.

Now, how, you ask, did I become so knowledgeable about the MPS system? Well, it really just started this past weekend with Dad.  As we stood by the sink, dad washing, me drying, the phone rang.  It was an old friend of my parents calling to report that the deathly illness that everyone was fearing for the friends husband was, thank god, NOT.  He was going to be fine and not die after all.  Great news.  Dad hung up, reported it joyously to me and returned happily to his dishpan.  “Dad”.  I queried.  “Aren’t you going to call mom and tell her?”  Mom was getting her hair done in the city. “Oh, she’ll be home in a while.” And he blissfully continued washing the dishes.  Now my father may be the Bernie Madoff of the Marital Point System.  The Bill Buckner of wedded bliss.  He looks good on the surface but once you scratch it, he’s one big Ponzi scam or missed opportunity.  I love him to bits but my siblings and I are still overcompensating for the fact that dad’s idea of a great Christmas present for his beloved is a knife sharpener or a wastebasket.  He’ll do dishes til he’s blue in the face but were mom ever to require major surgery with anesthesia, days of recovery, removed organs and the like, I’m quite certain, unless prompted, he might want her to drive herself.  He’d bring her home, of course, if she called to remind him.  I have tried to help him. My siblings have tried to help him and yet,  after fifty, yes, fifty years of marriage, he can’t score more marital points.  Here he was passing up a perfectly good way to generate a TON of points by simply thinking enough to call my mother and tell her that, yipee, their good friend was not, in fact, dying.    One of the all time champs of losing marital points was my husbands father who only remembered birthdays when it was too late to do anything about it.  On my mother in laws 45th birthday, he proudly showed up for birthday dinner with her only present.  A recently, try fifteen minutes before, purchased blueberry pie.  A BLUEBERRY PIE.  When she ran weeping from the table after it’s presentation,  he pleaded to her departing back “But Roberta, you LOVE blueberry pie.”  While many men struggle with the MPS system, not all are failures.  I have friends whose husbands are major league champs.  One neighbors husband does all the cooking, shopping and laundry and she trains to become a professional bike racer.  Another spouse stays home so that my friend can continue the work she loves.    I have insider knowledge, however, that he could earn substantially more points if he actually cleaned, shopped and kept the kids under control rather than treating their home like a zoo with the four walls serving as just a way to keep the kids from escaping. Sure it allows her to do the job she loves plus everything else.  Another friend found herself pregnant at 43 after three months of dating and her now husband said, “Okay, let’s give it a shot.”  They have one of the best marriages I know, more than a decade in. I think because the marital points in that decision will last forever.  There’s a husband I know who thought that you could rack up enough points by simply buying tremendous gifts for every occasion and being absent, literally and physically,  the rest of the time.  My god, were the gifts good but she eventually ran off with the plumber who doted on her every word and liked helping pick wallpaper.  Not to mention being able to plumb.  My spouse is quite good in the marital point category.  He, in fact, just hollered up the stairs to see if there’s anything he can do to help.  He made dinner last night and often buys me spectacular pieces of jewelry or great clothes that he picks out himself.  This counteracts the negative point factor of shrinking my expensive French thong underwear by putting them in the dryer along with my cashmere sweaters, or forgetting to bring something for work that means I have to drive two hours into the bowels of a run down city to deliver it to him because he can’t leave the job, or promising to stock the house when he’s home and we’re away and his idea of stocking is a small container of Half and Half and a black banana, and I bought the banana.  All in all, I am a lucky woman and our point score, from where I stand,  is good.

For men, the point system seems to be based on a simpler equation.  Many, many points for any sexual act.  Even more points for the naughtier sexual acts.  Talking dirty or doing something completely unexpected while performing naughty sexual acts will almost guarantee a lifetime at the top of the MRS game.  And if you are willing to wear a nurses uniform while doing it all.  I don’t need to continue.  The only point reduction in the male world seems to be the result of any sort of irresponsible financial behavior, like, say, when you, just for instance, go to Starbucks for a cappuccino and then for a quick 15 dollar pedicure at the Korean nail place but you don’t check the balance in your checking account and so the four dollar Starbucks and the fifteen dollar pedicure have bank charges attached that result in a nineteen dollar series of small pleasures costing seventy five dollars.  It sounds crazy but it could happen.  Occasionally men subtract points in connection to a perceived betrayal usually involving sports.  One of my best friends got a big point reduction for purposely perpetrating an unbelieveable fraud by attending MINOR LEAGUE BASEBALL GAMES pre-nuptially and pretending to actually like them.  I would have to say that the spouse should lose some points for ever believing this charade.   Once the ring was on, I daresay, she never went to a minor league field again.  Huge loss of points but completely recovered by performing a dirty sex act.  I have a dear friend who just had a horrible multi month ordeal of exhausting medical treatments.  On the back end she pointed out how truly incredible her spouse had been, how grateful she was and how much she feared the amount of time she was going to have to spend on either back or knees to repay him.  All about the points.  MPS.  Really, with men, all points can be covered under the MPS-SA scorecard.  Marital Points Score-Sexual Acts.  The more Sexual Acts, the higher your rating.  It’s that simple.  Nothing else you do really matters.

Now, I could go on with this lesson in statistics forever but I’m too tired.  I do hope that it helped you gay men and women out there contemplating that walk down the long and winding aisle.  Marriage is not a piece of cake. It is, in fact,  a highly complicated set of statistical problems that will vary from relationship to relationship and is really about who does what and when and who does it better.  And with more thought.  Or with better technique.  You know what I mean..  And just to wrap this up, Dad did call Mom and give her the good news about their friend.  Huge Points.  I know, however, that once Mom reads this blog, and she will, that she will know that dad didn’t have the idea on his own and the points will vanish faster than the money in the US Treasury.  But maybe Dad will have learned his lesson.  Cause, trust me, once mom reads this, there will be no naughty sex acts in his future.  Although that is too horrifying even to contemplate.

A joke from Kerri:

Best friend? 


This really works…try this experiment.

Put your dog and your wife in the trunk of the car

at the same time, for one hour.  When you open it, 

see which one is happy to see you?

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, 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.

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.