Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The age of a woman doesn’t mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.” Well that’s all fine and dandy if your strings aren’t springing from all the wrong places and your tailpiece isn’t hanging so low that even the most desperate of musicians wouldn’t consider playing with you. Besides, that quote sounds like a guilty overcompensation to me anyway—he probably told his wife that she looked fat in her bustle. We all know how these things go. I’m not saying some women don’t age beautifully—some even grow more attractive with the years. Maybe other women’s fiddles are just as perky as the day they got their first faddle. But for me—I wasn’t a Stradivarius to begin with.
Age, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the frickin’ ways! First, I’m fatter. My thighs show dimples through anything less than three-ply, heavy-duty polyester with a double-width silk lining. I had surgery a couple of years ago and I had to wear support stockings, the kind that you might have seen your grammy wear underneath a floral housecoat, but I’ve gotta say, those little buggers look more attractive every day. Although, let it be noted that when I do choose to wear control-top pantyhose, it looks like I’m baking bread in there, and somebody put too much yeast in the batch.
Then there’s the gym. I find the showers and their postage stamp towel size to be a humiliating experience of coochi coochi peek-a-boo. Who the hell do they size these towels for anyway? It’s like Tommy the Towelmaker’s only female experience was with a bunch of pygmy adolescents who suffered from an eating disorder. I spend the short walk from shower to locker doing a spastic dance with my towel snapping this way and that. I suddenly realize that I vaguely resemble a matador in a desperate death match with a bull—only when I see myself in the mirror naked, I’m not sure which one I am. Ole!
Second on my list of reasons why I hate being older, I’m hairier. Yeah… I wish I were talking about my head. I have hair in places I didn’t even know that follicles existed. I’m just waiting to wake up one morning and find that I’ve sprouted a tongue beard. Until then, the downy fuzz above my lip now warrants daily warfare with the tweezers. I’m also quite certain that if I let things go on my chin, I could compete with Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian’s goatee. The scientific term is hirsutism; the lesser-known appellation is, “shitloads of body hair which mimics the growth pattern of the adult male Silverback gorilla.” I wish it stopped there. Welcome to my hell, soon to be thirty-somethings… because it doesn’t. It would seem that what I once tenderly referred to as my panty hamster has morphed into Bikini Bigfoot—or as I like to call her when she’s particularly untamed, My Hairy Sascrotch.
Let’s move on to my third reason. I’m a daily contender for the Sag Awards. You would be correct in assuming that this has nothing to do with acting. Let’s start at the bottom. The junk in this trunk just blew out my tires and the back end is hanging something terribly low. Then there’s my back, and a conspicuous absence of the “small” of it. I prefer to call this part, “That region where buttocks meet the bra.” I’m also a sufferer of “Back Crack.” Yeah. You know what I’m talking about. The twin spots on your side below your bra strap, where age seems to have brought on matching diminutive derrieres. I find that if I ever choose to parade myself around in lingerie, I do a great deal of posing with my arms stretched upwards just to hide my back crack. Lately though, when I lift my arms, those little asses just seem to smile bigger.
Then there are my breasts, Laverne and Shirley, as I used to affectionately term them, and this might be the worst age insult of all. They simply aren’t what they used to be. One look at Penny Marshall these days, and that’s all you need to know about my Tata formerly known as Laverne. Then there’s the anthropology moment of the day after I’ve stepped out of a hot shower—the girls might as well be auditioning for a cover shot in National Geographic.
Okay. Enough! I could pick the old bag of bones apart until the fragments of my self-esteem that still exist completely fall to pieces. However, I’m not in the mood. I’m too old for that. And, here it comes: that’s the beauty of aging. When I was sixteen there wasn’t a single line on my face, but I also hated myself so damn much; the idea of even admitting my faults made me want to bury myself under a rock. In high school, I was a size eighteen, but I thought if I lied on my driver’s license and loudly proclaimed my weight at 135, no one would notice the giant elephant in the room… and by that, I mean me. Now, not only do I admit my imperfections, but I have the audacity to laugh at them. Sure, all that good humor has given me a few smile lines, but a wrinkle here or there is a small price to pay for the good times that I have lived. It’s not as if I’m enlightened; I’m just more practical, more aware that a shitty day is just one day—not a reason to run away from home, live in a tent in Alaska, and serially date criminals from the local halfway house. (Yes, I once did exactly that.)
I’m not going to lie and say that I love the wisdom that age brings—I’m more confused than I’ve ever been—but I love that my bewilderment is a product of seeing the world from myriad different viewpoints. I’m not the strident pain-in-the-ass that I once was. And I like it that way.