January 21st, 2010
Aging, gracefully and not…
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about aging. After all, my mother, God bless her, is 83 so….
No surprise that there’s a vast difference between the way people age, and how men and women do it gracefully or not. Women, generally speaking, do a lot to keep up appearances and men, again generally, do not.
I work in television and I know correspondents of both sexes who are in their 50’s. It’s a dangerous decade because there’s a lot of younger people on the air and television, after all, is about appearances. Why do you think I work behind the camera?
What kills me — and it surely must aggravate the women to no end — is how hard they work to keep up appearances while the men do little or nothing. No spinning classes for the men. It’s more along the lines of, “I’ll have the Porterhouse tonight and do you have a full-bodied Burgundy to go with?”
But that’s television where everyone who appears on camera is telegenic to begin with; they were blessed with good genes from the get-go.
And then there’s real life, and again I’m talking about people in their 50’s. I recently ran into a former colleague I have not seen in 20 years, give or take. When I spotted him, he was smoking outside an office building in Manhattan on a freezing cold day. This guy was always a bit out of shape but my God, he’d grown to three times the size and now he looked like a body double for President Taft.
When I called out his name, he tried desperately to take off his glove to shake my hand but he couldn’t get his glove off. His fingers were too pudgy — that glove was welded onto his hand. I shook his gloved hand and asked him what he was doing but all I could see was how much he’d grown. It suddenly dawned on me why I never run into the dozens of people I used to work with, many of whom I know still work in Manhattan. They’d probably changed so much I didn’t recognize them. I had barely recognized this guy.
After a few pleasantries, I wandered off. Hey, I know I’ve aged too. What little hair I once had is long gone so maybe he was saying the same thing about me.
That same day, a woman who used to work with both of us, sent me an email. It directed me to a photo layout on a website I’d never heard of. I was so sure it was some kind of virus that I called my friend and asked her if she’d really sent this. She had. It seems she had done some modeling and wanted me to judge some of her photographs.
I opened the link and I was stunned. This friend had sent me nearly 100 photos of herself in lingerie!! They were sexy, she looked great, and, well, she’s 55 years old!!! You go girl! Seems a photographer friend of hers was trying to get older women interested in boudoir photos for their husbands and boyfriends and was using my friend — a very pretty woman but not a model — as her model. Wow!
All those workouts, all that makeup, all that careful eating had paid off. My former colleague, the same age, had not fared nearly as well but all those cigarettes, all those hamburgers, all that beer had left their mark.
So yes, women may be paying a lot more attention to the way they age but, you know what? It shows!!