Archive | Age Matters

Bridget Jones’s Blergh

bridgetIt sounds dumb and, in fact, it is, but I’m wrangling mightily with the question of whether I should attend tonight’s critics’ screening of Bridget Jones’s Baby. There’s the fact that it’s bound to be terrible (even the book is, and this is not the sort of franchise likely to transcend its origin material). Then there’s the issue of Zelweger’s face–reacting to the drama around it, reigning myself in from the impulse to hit people who feel comfortable opining on it. All told, I should probably not go to the screening–I can easily get out of the related assignment–but something in me feels I am abandoning another fortysomething woman felled by the culture that once built her up. And this is something I’ll just never comfortably do.

Suria 8/27/71-9/11/01

suriaI’ll never forget the morning, only weeks before her death, when she taped a hair to the bathroom mirror with a note. It was her 30th birthday–30 seemed so old to us both–and in her big gorgeous calligraphy she had written: “MY FIRST GRAY HAIR.” There’s more to this story–in some ways it’s the story of my 20s–but 15 years later it still doesn’t feel like I’ve earned the right to tell it. All I can say is every time I curse all the gray mixed into my blonde, I flash on that note–her characteristic bemusement, her breezy assumption there’d be many more to come–and I cry. Suria.

Never Say Goodbye: Sweet MJ Forever

2802ec5b3bdbddd9692c7e0fe4291a7cToday would have been Michael Jackson’s fifty-eighth birthday, and he’s been on my brain since I woke. Diana Ross fell in love with him on first sight and so did I, fell for those big eyes beneath big fros long before either of us hit puberty. I adored him in the Jackson 5, emulated his Thriller moonwalk every day afterschool at my best friend Ansie’s. Listened to Off the Wall a ton when I started to have good sex in my twenties—even more when I learned to love in my thirties. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy