What's wrong with aging gracefully?

I have a morbid fascination with celebrity plastic surgery. Whenever we see an older celeb on TV or in the movies, I'm always searching their faces, looking for the signs. Usually you don't have to look too far--sometimes it slaps you right in your own face. I've never gotten over whatever it was that Steve Martin did to his wonderful eyes ten or twelve years ago; they're a good inch farther apart than they used to be.

Several months ago we went to see a very good movie called "Easy A" which starred young Emma Stone, who is a favorite of ours, and which also starred the not-so-young Patricia Clarkson (age 51) and Lisa Kudrow (age 47.) In all of Clarkson's and Kudrow's scenes, I kept staring at their faces and marveling at how natural and wonderful they each looked.

They each have some wrinkles, but it works for them. They don't have weird cheekbones, their eyes aren't too far apart. Clarkson in particular just glowed on-screen, and I understand they have make-up and lighting people to make them look good, but her face still looks natural.

I think both ladies looked even better to me because we had just sat through a preview for the movie "Burlesque," starring Cher, whom I hadn't seen on-screen in quite a long time.


To be fair to Cher, she is 64 years old, older than Kudrow and Clarkson. And when you find a picture of her where she's holding her face still, she can almost look normal--not 64 years old, but not quite a circus freak yet. But watching her try to move her mouth and talk through all that filler in her face was frankly horrifying.

All this came back into my memory tonight when I was watching this show on PBS called "Pioneers of Television." I've only managed to catch a couple episodes of this, but they take a TV genre and go back and look at some of the key shows and interview whatever stars they can find who are still alive and relatively coherent. It's fun and nostalgic.

Tonight the topic was crime dramas, and there were three women who were interviewed for this show who made me wonder all over again how it is that we've bought into this belief that loads of plastic surgery are the only way we can hang onto the illusion of youth--and that youth is an illusion worth hanging onto in the first place.


Barbara Bain was drop-dead gorgeous 40 years ago, playing a covert agent on "Mission: Impossible." Now she's 81 years old, and I think she still looks terrific.

My mom always used to tease my dad about Angie Dickinson--apparently he had a little crush on her when she was on "Policewoman" back in the 70s. She was beautiful then:

And I think she's held up pretty darn well for someone pushing 80:

And then there was Stefanie Powers, who starred in a goofy little show called "The Girl from UNCLE" in the mid-60's and also in "Hart to Hart" in the 80's.


She's almost 70 now and still looks amazing:

It's not that I believe none of these women have had plastic surgery. We're talking Hollywood here--I think they give you an open-ended coupon for one free procedure when you get your SAG card. In the cheekbone areas, especially, I wouldn't be surprised if all three of them have had work. But it's unobtrusive. It enhances rather than distracts. And most importantly, they left some sags and wrinkles and folds, instead of just polishing their whole face to a smooth flat surface like...well...

I also don't think plastic surgery has been kind to Meg Ryan (age 49):

Or Priscilla Presley (age 65):

To quote Helena Bonham Carter (age 44 and un-plastic surgeried): "You have two choices. You can have the work done and look weirder, or have nothing done and look older. I think the only way I’ll continue to get work is if I don’t get anything done…I can still move all my face muscles! There aren’t many who can still do that."

I think I'd rather look old than weird. Ask me again in 20 years, and I may choose differently, but I think old is okay. And there are so many beautiful older women! They're older, they own it, and their faces are still beautiful. I love being able to see a person's life in their face, not their surgeries.

Do you remember the time?

Well, I am going to do something I almost never do on this blog: talk about a celebrity and a current event. I don't talk about celebrities much because I'm not really a celeb lover, and I don't talk about current events because that's not really what this blog is for.

But Michael Jackson! How could I not talk about him?

Actually, it would be really easy for me not to talk about him and his death. I was never a big fan--he had some songs I liked and that was about it. And I've spent the past 15 years or so just shaking my head every time he popped up on the news. He was a very sad, very damaged, very sick guy.

However. When you're in those years when you're really starting to notice the world and make all those memories that shape the rest of your life--say ages 10-20?--the things that happen in those years almost become part of your DNA. And Michael Jackson was happening in those years of my life. You couldn't get away from him, he was absolutely everywhere, especially when Thriller was out. It's hard to explain to someone who wasn't there how pervasive his face and his music were. Life in the 80's wasn't like life today, where everyone has their own little obscure bands they listen to that only 10 other people have ever heard of. Even if you weren't really a fan, if you listened to the radio at all, you listened to Michael Jackson.

So I think that when someone like that dies, part of the shock or grief or whatever it is that people feel has less to do with that specific person, and maybe more to do with how that person made them feel, the memories associated with them, the feeling of who you were when their music was playing in the background of your life. Part of the mourning is a mourning for that time and who you were then.

You shared planet time with an extraordinarily talented person, and now he's gone and you're still here. Which also feels weird and unsettling, and maybe worthy of taking a minute or two to ponder.

I turned on the news for about five minutes but no one was talking about anything beyond speculation--what happens to his money? to his kids?--so I started channel-flipping and landed on MTV, which is showing his videos all night long (extremely fitting, since he almost singlehandedly put MTV on the map.) Now I'm just sitting here and blogging and doing some crossword puzzles before bed, and enjoying the music and memories. Feels nice.

Babbles.

I'm up late at night again, talking to myself. Todd conked out at 9:30 while we were watching "The New Adventures of Old Christine" on DVD. I love Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Anybody who can look that good at whatever her age is--without getting all plastic-surgery-freakish--is a hero to me. (Wikipedia says she's 48.) And she is so funny, and she loves being funny and doing whatever it takes to get the laugh. Love it!

We had fajitas tonight because I saw Tyler Florence make them on the Food Network last week and they looked delicious. I used his recipe, which calls for chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, which I'm sure are stacked in mountains on the grocery store shelves in L.A. and New York, but which are harder to come by here in what we fondly call the butt crack of Virginia.

I had to go to two different stores to find them, and in the second store, I had to keep muttering "chipotles in adobo, chipotles in adobo" to myself as I was shopping, so I wouldn't forget to go back to the Mexican aisle and pick them up, as I'd already passed that aisle once and forgotten.

It occurred to me that "chipotles in adobo" would be a good mantra if you were in one of the goofier meditative religions and needed a catchy mantra. It's just this side of nonsensical, especially if you mutter it 10 or 20 times.

I think weird thoughts in the grocery store. At my old grocery store, I would wheel my cart around and sing along with the oldies they played on the Muzak system, so chanting grocery items is a step up from that, I think. Maybe not. Anyway, the fajitas were good. It was hard to scrub the chipotle stink off my hands, though.

I was doing really well for a long time with planning meals, making grocery lists, and cooking, but somehow the double whammy of Christmas travel and being sick really threw me off my stride. We're still eating at home most of the time, but I'm scrounging around at the last moment every night for an idea, and I don't like that. I need to get back into my groove.

The couponing has just been dreadful lately, too, and that's also disheartening. There are so many of them I just can't or won't use because the products are too salty or too gross or whatever, and it seems like the ones I do use are getting worse. 50¢ off one item is much better (when your store doubles and triples coupons under 99¢) than $1.00 off two items is. And the sticker shock is such that I really feel motivated to get those coupons and USE them with the sales. It's just not happening.

I've been having to go to my happy place a lot the past few days because of my anxiety over this economic stimulus package and the cost of it and hearing every day about jobs lost, and homes lost, and the post office talking about cutting back mail days because it's so broke...it's all a little disturbing. I try not to fret about it because there's nothing I can do about any of it, but it's this nagging worry and you can't help but wonder how bad it's really going to get. And you have no idea who to believe about what we need to do to fix it all. It's not keeping me up nights, but I know there are lots and lots of people who are having sleepless nights wondering how they're going to survive, and I feel terrible for them. We are doing okay for now--Todd's company has more work than they have people to do it--but I don't want to get complacent. Things can change in an instant.

And on that cheerful note--night-night.

Play it, Sam...

Your result for Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? Or Someone Else? Mad Men-era Female Icon Quiz ...

You Are an Ingrid!

You are an Ingrid -- "I am unique"

Ingrids have sensitive feelings and are warm and perceptive.

How to Get Along with Me

• * Give me plenty of compliments. They mean a lot to me.
• * Be a supportive friend or partner. Help me to learn to love and value myself.
• * Respect me for my special gifts of intuition and vision.
• * Though I don't always want to be cheered up when I'm feeling melancholy, I sometimes like to have someone lighten me up a little.
• * Don't tell me I'm too sensitive or that I'm overreacting!

What I Like About Being an Ingrid

• * my ability to find meaning in life and to experience feeling at a deep level
• * my ability to establish warm connections with people
• * admiring what is noble, truthful, and beautiful in life
• * my creativity, intuition, and sense of humor
• * being unique and being seen as unique by others
• * having aesthetic sensibilities
• * being able to easily pick up the feelings of people around me

What's Hard About Being an Ingrid

• * experiencing dark moods of emptiness and despair
• * feelings of self-hatred and shame; believing I don't deserve to be loved
• * feeling guilty when I disappoint people
• * feeling hurt or attacked when someone misundertands me
• * expecting too much from myself and life
• * fearing being abandoned
• * obsessing over resentments
• * longing for what I don't have

Ingrids as Children Often

• * have active imaginations: play creatively alone or organize playmates in original games
• * are very sensitive
• * feel that they don't fit in
• * believe they are missing something that other people have
• * attach themselves to idealized teachers, heroes, artists, etc.
• * become antiauthoritarian or rebellious when criticized or not understood
• * feel lonely or abandoned (perhaps as a result of a death or their parents' divorce)

Ingrids as Parents

• * help their children become who they really are
• * support their children's creativity and originality
• * are good at helping their children get in touch with their feelings
• * are sometimes overly critical or overly protective
• * are usually very good with children if not too self-absorbed

Where Oprah can stick her Kindle.

Every time I go to Amazon to look up a book or find a gift, I have to look at the ads for the Kindle on the home page. Which is moderately annoying. I don't want a Kindle, I have no interest in a Kindle, stop showing me the Kindle!

Well, now they've ramped up the annoyance factor; here's the new first line of the Kindle ad:

"This summer, Oprah received a gift that she says changed her life. 'I'm telling you, it is absolutely my new favorite thing in the world,' she says."

Really, Oprah? Don't you mean it's absolutely your new favorite thing for ten minutes, until the next company comes along and asks you to push its new car, its $500 jeans, its latest wacko New Age religion?

And why do I suspect that Oprah received that life-changing gift from Amazon, and not from one of her BFFs? (Assuming she has any besides Gayle and Stedman the beard.)

It all makes sense, really--Oprah exists to sell American women useless things they don't need, and there could be nothing more useless than the Kindle. I already own too many things that constantly have to be recharged or renewed with fresh batteries. Sitting down with a book or a mag made out of paper is actually a refreshing change--I don't have to make sure it's charged, I can read it in the bathtub, and if the zombie war ever happens, I'll still be able to read my books when the power grid goes down.

The other nice thing about the zombie war will be that Oprah will either be holed up in her bunker or torn limb from limb by a zombie audience and I'll never have to hear of her again.

Pictures.

I've got about three months' worth of photos to catch up on here at the blog. Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear...October 2007:

Here I am on my 37th birthday, in Smithfield, VA, on a luncheon-and-shopping day with my mother-in-law and my friend Cheryl. It's been three months and I still haven't come to terms with being 37 yet. By the time I do, 38 will be right around the corner!

Smithfield is a fun, old little town, famous for its ham and pork products, and booming around the edges with lots of brand-new homes and ugly shopping centers. But the downtown has some great old homes and storefronts:

It was one of those gorgeous blue-sky fall days, and WARM! We browsed through an antique mall and had lunch in a terrific cafe/bakery downtown. I seem to recall coconut cake...mmmmm...

More pictures later.

Isn't is sad, sad, sad about Heath Ledger? There's this really selfish part of me that hates it when actors die tragically, because scenes that I formerly enjoyed in their movies will now be forever tinged with sadness over their death. I'll never be able to totally enjoy "10 Things I Hate About You" again, when he leaps down the bleachers singing to Julia Stiles. Selfish, I know. What a life he could have had...it's a waste.

Todd is downstairs catching up on the last season of "Gilmore Girls" and I'm poking around on the computer in my study for the first time in a long time. For those who have asked--I will get back to my aborted Christmas journal, I promise. I just have to get some of the other piles of chores attended to first!