Today I Am a Ma'am: and Other Musings On Life, Beauty, and Growing Older (5 page)

At first, she thought the wave of heat was merely a reaction to the terror she felt for the infant. Maybe someone shut off the air conditioning. No, that couldn’t be it. It was the middle of winter. Then it hit her. It was a hot flash! “Imagine that,” she told me later. “The baby and I were both going through hormonal transitions simultaneously.”

Another friend had her first hot flash in the supermarket. She was looking for an item in the freezer case. She just leaned in and closed her eyes. The cold air felt so good. She basked in the icy breeze, imagining a vacation at the North Pole. Suddenly, a man’s voice broke into her reverie. “Excuse me, ma’am. Are you going to be much longer?”

She turned around and there was a line of people with their shopping carts waiting to get into the freezer section. Flustered, she announced, “They seem to be out of fudge ripple ice cream.”

Yet another cop story. The scene was Beverly Hills and I was on my way to pick up my daughter at school. I was coming up to a stop sign. I looked right. All clear. I looked left and noticed a police car. I kept right on going.

Sirens behind me. The cop pulled me over.

I was mortified. “Officer,” I said, “I don’t know why I did that. I saw the stop sign.”

He was shaking his head in disbelief. “Miss,” he said, “I must tell you, that was an existential experience for me.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He said, “I looked at you. I saw you look at me. Then I saw you go through the stop sign, and I said to myself, ‘Am I here? Do I exist?’”

What could I say. “Officer, I deserve the ticket.”

“Yes, you do, but in what reality? On what plane of existence do I write it?”

He let me go without a ticket.

I used to keep track of how many years I had left to live. When I turned thirty, I figured I had about forty, forty-five years to go. When I turned forty, I thought, I’ve lived half my life. When I hit fifty, I started thinking maybe I had thirty good years left in me. Now I laugh at myself. What a stupid exercise. The idea of diminished possible time is an illusion. Whether you’re seven or seventy, you really just have the one moment you’re living in now.

My mother, God love her, used to say, “I wouldn’t be thirty again for all the tea in China. Look what I’m
not
missing.” And she meant it. She also gave me a wonderful mind game one can play to soothe the passing of the decades. She once said that forty is younger than thirty-nine because forty is a beginning and thirty-nine is an end. I used it recently, telling myself I was
starting
my sixties, not wrapping up my fifties.

It’s all in your state of mind. You can be happy growing older or you can be miserable, and it’s in your power to make that choice for yourself.

When we were doing
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, there was an episode that called for a woman in her seventies who was doddering and frail. The producer cast an actress who had been around Hollywood for decades. She was seventy-five. Despite her considerable experience, she just couldn’t get the character right.

During a coffee break I asked the actress if she’d like help working on her lines and she agreed. She still couldn’t get it right, and she was growing frustrated. “I should be able to do this,” she said. “After all,
I’m
seventy-five myself.” Suddenly, I realized. Of course. She was supposed to be playing a doddering old lady of seventy-five, but she didn’t feel that way. She felt vital and healthy. The part didn’t ring true for her. “Listen,” I suggested, “try playing it like you’re one hundred, not seventy-five.” Presto! She became a little old lady. State of mind.

In 1900 the average life expectancy for a woman was fifty-five, so menopause did signal the end of life. Today, the average age of menopause is fifty-two, and the average life expectancy for a woman is eighty. The big question is, what are you going to do with the next thirty years of your life?

Millie, a friend of many years, told me about a beauty trick used by legendary silent screen star Dolores del Rio. Her advice was simple: Never open your mouth wide when you’re laughing. To show mirth, part your lips slightly, toss your head back in a posture of great gaiety, and let the laughter drift from your throat. Make no lateral movement with your mouth that might result in laugh lines.

What women won’t do to look young! I practiced the technique a few times with Millie, but it cracked us up so much that our lines were multiplying like crazy. Sorry, Dolores!

I get suspicious when I hear that phrase “fabulous at fifty.” What does it mean? Don’t we all get it by now that it means
looking
fabulous? That if you don’t
look
fabulous, you can’t
be
fabulous?

How about being fabulous as human beings? Having fabulous awareness, manners, generosity? How about having a fabulous sense of humor, a capacity to love and laugh, interest in others? How about being fabulous to be around, being fabulous at listening, sharing, contributing, teaching, enjoying? How about being fabulous from within?

I know many women who are truly fabulous. It doesn’t matter that they have lines on their faces, gray hair, extra pounds, extra veins, or extra chins.

And P.S.—the next time you are tempted to feel inadequate or envious when you see a dazzling fifty-plus woman beaming from a magazine cover, keep in mind that you are seeing the result of a day’s work by a crew of professionals. Perfect lighting, a wind machine, special lenses and gels, and the all-important hair and makeup crew. We could all look spectacular if we had technicians following us around to cast the right glow. In fact, according to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the very word
fabulous
means “resembling a fable.”

Would you rather be the stuff of fable, or a real woman? Both? I know, I know.

But the trivial pursuit of fabulousness crowds out so much life that could be lived and savored.

G
ENDER
I
NEQUITY

A man with gray in his hair is considered “distinguished.”

A woman with gray in her hair is “letting herself go.” Why not call her hair ensilvered . . . moondusted?

A man with a weathered, lived-in face is described as rugged, with craggy good looks.

A woman needs only a few lines to be deemed haggard. Why not call her face eloquent?

A man of a certain age walks into a room and people take notice. He has gravitas.

A woman of a certain age walks into a room and she is invisible. Why is it so hard to see her allure?

How do you know you’ve reached that “certain age”? There are unmistakable, visible signs. For example . . .

Phyllis Diller, the perfectly marvelous comedienne, refers quite proudly to her upper arm droop as “my draperies.” She says, “They’re mine. They’re beautiful. I’ve got something to show for all the years.”

Phyllis made this remark to our mutual pal Joanne who was sweating herself into a puddle wearing turtlenecks and long sleeves during the sweltering Southern California summers. It completely changed Joanne’s relationship to her arm jiggle. The other day she dropped by, arms laden with roses from her garden. She looked adorable in a bright turquoise, scoop-necked, sleeveless top—a cool, comfortable, great-looking sixty-nine-year-old.

“Thanks to Phyllis, I’m released from the tyranny of the coverup,” she beamed.

“An instant face-lift is a smile,” says Joanne. She’s right, but some feel they need more help. I don’t have anything against cosmetic surgery. I think it’s just fine to give yourself a psychological lift with a youthful touchup. But in Hollywood there is such a desperation about looking young that women aren’t just hiring surgeons, they’re retaining contractors. Don’t we all agree that certain people have gone off the deep end into the plastic surgery transformation pool and don’t even remotely resemble themselves anymore? The transformation isn’t from
old
to
young
. It’s from
mature
to
scary
.

Blank lidless eyes that look like lizards in the Sahara sun. Puffy lips and grimacing smiles. I don’t get it. I thought the purpose of plastic surgery was to look like a better rested, more youthful
you
.

If being young is the highest value, how can anyone be happy? If you live by the absurd notion that you must look like a young girl, you may as well be living a scene from
The Fugitive
—always looking over your shoulder as time inexorably overtakes you.

So, if you’re hitting the beautification—i.e., reconstruction—trail, here are a few questions to keep in mind:

Another thing I don’t quite get is the new trend involving shooting a quart of collagen into a woman’s lips. In my experience, there are three ways to get lips like that—be a battered woman, get stung by a bee, or wear the big red wax kind that are popular at Halloween. A little enhancement is one thing. But you know you’ve gone too far when . . .

I have a beautiful, amazing neighbor and friend named Feliza. She was a Vanderbilt for a time in her youth. Now eighty, Feliza is a powerhouse. She walks a mile every day, gardens, bakes, and generally never sits still. Over lunch one day I asked, “Did you ever think about having plastic surgery?”

“Oh, I don’t have the time, Val,” she replied, “and if I did, I wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t have the surgery?”

“No, the time,” she said with a twinkle. “I don’t have the time to think about having the surgery.”

It’s not even on her radar screen. As Feliza is living it, eighty looks great!

Will we reach the point when the new sign of old age will be the overcorrected face? “Wow! Look at all the work she’s had done. She must be one hundred and three!”

Wrinkles should be a sign of having lived, having put in some time and put out a ton of energy. Creases, lines, age spots, sags should be badges of honor for having stayed in the game of life and participating full-out. We need to appreciate the time put in on the planet by the owner of a face with such obviously earned credits.

The new face of old age could be the real one, not a plastic mock-up. A face full of experience, knowledge, humor, and peace.

I think midlife women crave humor. They crave honesty and understanding. When I get together with my women friends, we end up on the floor laughing—at our lives, our men, our hangups, our appetites, and our fantasies. I’m glad that we’ve overcome that need we had when we were younger to pretend everything was fine when it wasn’t. Today we
vent
with abandon! I come away from these sessions with a lighter heart, a more ironic view of my world. It energizes me.

While you’re scouring the shelves of your local health food store for the latest in yam creams, metabolic coolants, mood stabilizers, and other remedies on the menopausal “must have” list, don’t forget to pick up a gallon of laughs. Without humor, midlife can be as dry as your—well, let’s just say it can be a drag.

Did you know there is scientific research that actually equates good health with humor? Humor has been shown to reduce stress, raise your pain threshold, and boost your immune system. In one study, people listening to twenty minutes of Lily Tomlin doing her telephone operator routine were much less sensitive to pain than those listening to an academic lecture.