Arriving at beauty

It has been said that until we can define something we can't think about it. The brain needs a handle of sorts to grab onto what it wants to talk to itself about. The problem with that, of course, is definitions are very dangerous territory. How we define something is critical to how we measure it. Definitions being as powerful as they are, I approach them they way I do people dancing on the subway: they may be harmless, and even entertaining, but I keep my eye on them just in case.

I've been in this mode of intelligence gathering since I turned 50 about the definition of beauty. This is one of the big questions, the kind we were presented with in Philosophy 101--which never got solved, of course, or there would be no need for Philosophy 201 and its accompanying tuition. In fairness, these big questions do take time to work through, especially when interrupted by breast cancer and buying a convertible, which not surprisingly were events in my life that happened very close together.

The biggest problem with a 50+ year old woman talking about beauty is getting over that tinny echo of defensiveness. One begins to avoid the discussion at all because it has that ring of doth protesting too much, as if we are hiding the truth of our dismay behind a lemons-to-lemonade approach to what is seen as our decline. Well, fuck that. There has never been a topic off limits to my mind. So, I think I will start where I always do: with the truth as I experience it, not heard it to be.

My experience is that beauty does not end, but it changes. And now I understand exactly how, which is a feeling similar to when I gave birth to my children--an amazing lightness after being weighted down for what seemed like a lifetime, and having my body back to myself, not housing another. There is a freedom in that which I can still call up, so radical and physical was its shift in me.

My beauty, when younger, was the beauty of youth. It was male-centric, exterior, and had a shine of innocence, even with all I had been through. It was lovely, in its own right, though even then I felt its limits and pushed against them, to no avail. I wanted to feel confident, and I rarely did, though I learned how to mimic it for success and survival. I wanted autonomy, but I craved male attention as if captive to some inner imperative I did not understand. I hated my innocence. I wanted to slice through it and find that self-comfort I saw embodied in some older women. Yet, when youth began its slow drip away, I felt a static of fear firing across my brain. It had been all that I'd known of beauty; it had been my truth.

And now, a new definition is in its place. I cannot take credit for it; it was not a flash of insight. That drip of draining youth, it turns out, was being captured in a crystal glass, just waiting for me to drink. This is a Socratic beauty: where the inner and the outer are as one. Where once male attention was a measure, my attention to how it feels to create beauty is now its entire reason. As I have freed from dressing for another, my style has flourished in the joy of creating it anew each day, something I never knew when I was desperate to be seen. It is now Intelligence, as C.S. Lewis spoke of it in his wife--that synergy of wisdom, confidence and humor about it all. All that, with the tender care and feeding of my body as it is now:  beautiful, vital, and not young.

If we as women do not get over this conversation being classified as sour grapes by those too young or too afraid to flourish in this ripened beauty, we will go on cramming into a too-young definition like we do those skinny jeans, looking desperate and unable to breathe. We will create daughters terrified of its arrival, who get Botox in their twenties, instead of those who, with their friends, celebrate their mothers' beauty, call them friend and are not afraid.

When I was in my thirties, I had a meeting with a woman in her fifties. Her hair, in a perfect chignon, was a silver blond, as mine is now. Her posture betrayed a life of dance. Her makeup was a beige canvas for a lipstick so red I see it still. While everyone drank coffee from Styrofoam cups, she drank her tea from a china cup with saucer. She laughed easily. She said no with grace and an utter lack of guilt. I felt see-through beside her; she was substance and everything I wanted to be. She did not covet my youth, nor did she dismiss it. She shined on me. She knew our different beauties; I was not her enemy.

Fifty is not the new thirty. It is the new fifty. And it's beautiful as can be.

Once in love with Amy

Well, my first Valentines Day in New York City is about to sling its arrow of outrageous fortune my way in less than 48 hours. Even when I did have a man in close proximity to my La Perlas, I can't say I ever cared much for the holiday. To begin with, it involves leaving the house in February, which has become even less desirable this winter, as I'm still walking on snow that fell while I was doing my Christmas shopping.  I mean, I think it's snow. Or it's those familiar carcinogenic bus fumes now available in a brand new flavor. And, then there's the overall downgrade in the quality of chocolate making its way into unsuspecting homes across America. Not to mention the ubiquitous red roses--the Barry Manilow of the floral kingdom.

My celebrations of love are usually marked by a martini and an in-market test of whether or not my mascara is truly sweat-proof, said sweat consisting of water and $180 an ounce perfume proven to be worth every penny.  Valentines Day does have something to recommend it, however. It is the best day of the year for being able to openly discern romantics from people I could actually like.

There are three types of heterosexual men riding the subway on February 14th: those carrying gifts--taken; those listening to Coldplay on their iPods--romantics; and those who look up from checking their phones upon hearing me unzip my jacket--possibilities.  

But, I have to say, I'm just not in the mood for some inexplicable reason, possibly having to do with an amazing workload, a broken collarbone, and a really good book. So I've decided to make this Valentines Day about self-love, which has turned this whole holiday around already. I've started with a love letter to myself: a shocking exercise as it made me realize how much of my journal is about what is going wrong, and not about what is going so very right. I had a facial and scheduled it early in the day so I wasn't laying there wondering if the dog was going to pee on my new rug. I ate a burger with caramelized onions and didn't leave off the cheese.

Best of all, it has made me think to count myself among those I love. And that's something worth celebrating, even in the middle of February.

Honesty Policy

I sit tonight waiting for the second major snow of the winter, even as soot-crusted remnants remain of the last one--a storm I place now, chronologically, in the mental file folder of "right after," meaning right after a man on a bicycle did his best to relieve me of the burden of my handbag. I also refer to that event as Christmas Eve, which when combined with the attempted larceny gives both events a certain gravitas, as if the parting gift of a broken clavicle was not enough.

In the telling, it never fails to deepen the despair for humanity and where we are all headed, when a woman can't go out and do some last-minute getting without ending up at St. Luke's talking to detectives instead of making her 7:30 dinner rez at Bar Baloud. And, in fact, there is some sense of naive surprise that there is not, actually, a cease-thieving called at noon on December 24th. It would seem it's actually its busy season, with my mugger and I both waiting until the last minute to do our shopping, giving us something else in common besides  coveting my Prada bag.

Since it happened, I find my already well- entrenched insouciance has magnified. It may be the pain killers, or may just be a normal response to being slammed to the ground, but I find detachment from human nonsense easier than ever these days. The bald act of robbery has, perversely, a kind of honesty at its center--if not morally, certainly in its purpose. The man who tried to grab my handbag was not pretending to do otherwise. In that way, my responding by not letting go was a direct and unambiguous exchange between us. It had an almost Zen-like clarity. While I do not wish to repeat it, it served to heighten my insistence that all attempts at passive-aggressive behavior directed toward me in the new year be immediately met with aggressive-aggressive behavior. Unless I don't care enough, which will then turn quickly in to passive-passive, and may involve a very dry martini.

See. I feel better already.

Another Saturday Night and I Ain't Got no Buddy

Last night, after barely escaping from a play with my intellectual life, I was filled with a longing usually reserved for Italian bakeries, Johnny Depp and napping, in exactly that order. Why, I thought, am I not the most influential critic of an influential newspaper? This was not my ego run amok, which has certainly happened before, though not usually without a makeup artist present and very soft track lighting. No, this was actually a rare sighting of an altruistic impulse. How might I save another woman from leaving her apartment in arctic winds and ruining with her wool beret the one time her hair come out exactly the way her hairstylist swore under oath that it would? How could I save her using the over-priced eye pencil, her internal ten-minute debate over footwear, the depleted metro card? How ever could I stop yet another New York City Saturday night entertainment ambush?

Now, the morning after, I want to track down the rave review I read and force said reviewer--at pen point, if necessary--to read the complete works of Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker and Fran Lebowitz before ever writing the word "wit" again without a permit. "Angry Young Women in Low Rise Jeans with High Class Issues" is the worst writing I've heard read out loud since freshman poetry. I would have gone back further in my educational career, but the writing was better.

How, in a post-Lindsay-Lohan world, any sentence including the word "pubes" can shock people enough that they guffaw like middle-school boys remains an unsolved mystery in the cold light of day. Clearly, I was an outlier in the audience, being that I can actually listen and think simultaneously. I would have found the play depressing if it weren't for the fact that I have never met women like those depicted, nor have had any occasion to let a man talk me into taking off my top because of a contract, marital or otherwise.

It was with no surprise that I discovered this puddle-deep exploration of women's sexual psyches was written by a man. That explained the Animal House nudity, if not how he got obviously talented female actors to mouth his drivel. I can only guess that Italian bakeries were involved.

Whatever shall they wear?

It has been called to my attention, through the ever-rapacious intellects at the New York Times, that New York City cab drivers have a dress policy. Surely, I thought, reading on, the New York Times had uncovered the Di Vinci code of cabbies. What else could explain the article's place on the front page? Perhaps it was one of those sub-cultural conventions we would never have known about if not for daring journalists following in the footsteps of Mario Puzo, bringing us the fashion equivalent of the mafia code of always sending a little something to the widow of a hit--a tacit acknowledgement of her loss of graft income, if not an enviable conversationalist.

But, no. It turns out that many cabbies reading the Times this morning will find out, along with me, that there is a dress code at all--one that has not been enforced very strongly, as any patron of the modern livery could have told you. Apparently all agree we have tumbled exceedingly far from the early 1900's when cab drivers actually wore uniforms modeled after West Point cadets. I, for one, am pleased not to be driven by a man in epaulets, having always found them too close for sartorial comfort to my own 80's shoulder-pad fashion coma, all images of which have either been burned or exchanged for good money under the cover of darkness at the base of the Verrazano bridge--and then burned.

But, the article was worth reading, for two reasons. It allowed me to momentarily fantasize that a news day this slow must mean all was well in the world, and the banks had paid back the money I gave them. And it gave me a good laugh, quoting a history professor who recalled a happier time, one when cab drivers wore slogan t-shirts, and "expressed their opinions." I can only deduce that this teacher is hailing taxies in an alternate universe, his doppelganger never once made privy to his driver's thoughts on the mayor, or the dark conspiracy concerning New Jersey drivers and their plot to slow down New York commerce by trying to back up out of the EZ-pass lane at the tunnel.

But I will keep my eyes open nonetheless for the sudden appearance of Armani behind the wheel. I just hope, whoever he is, that he still has an opinion.

Play to pay

It's not every day that one's world view shifts. One minute, there I am, trying to decide between Raisin Bran and leftover Pad Thai. And the next, this thought walks in the back door of my brain and I am so struck that I completely stop wondering what I did in my sleep to make my hair look like the top of the Chrysler building.

It started with remembering a dream where Derek Jeter and I are bowling. Well, truth is, Derek was bowling, and he was damn good at it. I was watching. That he was managing to bowl down a full alley in my 600 square foot apartment was pure dream-physics, along with the fact that he was, in the other room, also in a playoff baseball game. I knew this was a message dream, as Derek had clothes on, unlike others where he and I have co-starred with absolutely no artistic differences.

As my brain reviewed the tape, I realized that Jeter was not, technically, working. He was playing. And he had figured out how to get someone to give him money--a lot of it, actually--to do just that. Or maybe he hadn't figured it out as much as believed he could. And that's the thought that stopped me somewhere between the cereal and the milk. Especially as I have been struggling with just this concept ever since Bobby Cangelosi turned me in to the nuns for coloring hair onto the baby Jesus statue. I thought I'd done a brilliant job, especially with the bangs. Apparently not.

I wonder what would happen if we took play as seriously as Derek does--if we believed in the right to play with anything approaching our belief in the demands of work. So, I've decided to believe in playing, and report back. I'm starting small but have a feeling this whole thing is just going to snowball. Especially when I get a hold of some crayons.

Only two lives to give for my country

The front-page top-fold story in the Sunday NY Times today alerted Americans that its government--get ready for it--has been saying one thing and doing another. I know, I know--will this loss of collective innocence never stop? Apparently, this time, it's about cheese.

I have met only one person in my entire life that did not like cheese: a young child who had clearly confused those cellophane-wrapped orange-dyed paste squares with that glorious substance that is often the most interesting encounter at a cocktail party. I do not simply like cheese. A creamy herbed chevre, wheat crackers, and a buttery Chardonnay deliver what I believe people meditate in ashrams and enter sweat lodges to discover: that Socratic balance of inner and outer as one; the still point; the Om. That I do not eat this every night is only a testament to my frugality: I cannot afford to replace my Theory slacks to accommodate new thighs. Not in this economy.

It seems the US Government, through the Department of Agriculture, has been actively discouraging over-consumption of the food that the guy in the Dairy Management office down the hall--also part of the USDA--is spending money like a drunken starlet to promote. Those readers who've had anything more than a casual brush with corporate America can't help but do that snort/chuckle thing that substitutes for all the times at work we wanted to return to our pre-K behaviors and throw things--especially now that our pitching arm is so much better. The idea of one part of an organization working at complete cross-purposes to the goals of another department--both citing the exact same mission statement as their mandate--is not a foreign concept. In fact, it is the entire reason Dilbert cartoons and happy hour exist.

So, if you feel schizophrenic don't get paranoid. Yes, Virginia, we are bad girls and good girls--sometimes at the same time. With our very government funding both sides of the argument my advice to you is to go for a good long run, then order the Stracciatella. It would be un-American to do anything else.