My Discotheque Juliet Middle-Aged Dream
What to do when they tell you they've got beautiful covered already, thanks.
So my favorite filmmaker is out in Santa Barbara, on the beach, working on a movie. He had some ideas for it, but nothing was really working, and he was starting to run out of time. His mentor said, hey, you have some funding for this movie, why don't you hire an actor?
So he put out an ad looking for an older female actor. And got seven audition videos + resumes in an hour. He was quite shocked, but I said, “Do you know how many older women actors there are around LA looking for any work at all?”
For awhile SF MOMA had this gimmick where you could text them with a request and they'd send you back an image from their collection, which has more than 30,000 art works in it. I asked it to send me a picture of a "beautiful old woman." It sent me a photograph of a lotus blossom. I asked for just an "old woman," and it sent me a painting of an old man. My partner tried the same query and got a tree. A redwood, which I guess is old.
If you're a femme in the first 5 decades of your life, your prime directive is to be as pretty, beautiful, and sexy as possible. Then sometime after that, you forget how to put on eyeliner or something, so you go check the femme instruction manual and find that all the pages have gone blank. There's no instructions there for you at all. You go out on the street and people look right through you. You're a ghost now.
I guess I don't need to perfect that cat eye. What am I supposed to do now?
Professional female artists over 50 aren't great role models. They mostly seem to claw back the visual vocabulary of younger women, like 78-year-old Dolly Parton or 65-year-old Madonna, both of whom perform "pretty" and "beautiful" and "sexy" with exactly the same flawless rigor and perfectionism, and taking exactly the same forms, as they did 40 to 60 years ago. They're ghosts cleverly disguised as women. They live in a perpetual professional Neverland, like the Lost Boys, constantly at risk of being thinned out if they show any signs of growing up.
The actor my favorite filmmaker hired went to the same college as he does, but she graduated in 1965. He had told her they'd film on the beach, so she came to the shoot barefoot. He forgot to tell her about the climb down the cliffs to get to the beach.
"If you had told me about the accessibility issues at the site, I would never have agreed," she said. Her husband, who was her ride, parked himself on a park bench.
"Mom," he told me, "if you'd been there, you could have done it, but you would have held Dad's hand the whole way."
He looked at his angry actress and said, quietly, "Come on, you can do it. Here, take my hand," and little by little he walked her down the cliff to the beach. He filmed her dancing in the sand, diaphanous blue dress, bare feet, a cloud of that coarse blonde hair we all get when the color stops rising in it and it becomes a hollow crown of the thinnest bones, like spun sugar, twisting in the air like a cyclone.
I wore a backless dress for the first time in my life last Saturday. I had wanted a dress made out of sequins the size of luncheon plates, and it turned out if I wanted both to have such a dress and also to be able to pay for it, I had to sacrifice both the luxury of having any fabric at all in the dress besides the sequins and also having any sequins or, well, anything at all on the whole backside. The dress was really more of a knee-length statement necklace than an article of actual clothing.
When I was of the age that my femme instruction manual still had words in it, they read, "Thou canst not wear a backless dress; thy boobs are too big. They will spill and flop over like exhausted seals, and you will look like you popped an inner tube somewhere." However, thank God the march of human progress continues. In the intervening years since my instruction manual dissolved they have invented rolls of skin-colored tape with the engineering prowess of bridge cable.
My front side thus securely taped and stowed, I stood before my mirror spangled in sequins fully visible from space. Because I'm a COVID-safe bb, I also had my rhinestone-studded sippy drinking mask, and silver eyeliner, and silver eyeshadow. Because why stop there I was also wearing 10-inch platform boots in silver glitter.
This is obviously an appropriate outfit for a 51-year-old person with gray hair to wear to meet friends at little bar on the Mississippi in February. It is clearly immaterial that the friends I met were wearing cozy matching Fair Isle sweaters and jeans.
There was a wedding happening next door, with a lot of little kids twirling glow sticks on the dance floor. I went to the restroom and found the bridal party fixing their makeup. Clearly all the way overdressed even for an actual wedding, I looked at myself in the fluorescent-lit mirror and thought, "Wow. You look ridiculous. You look terrible. What were you thinking?"
No femme of any age needs to check the femme instruction manual to remember how to engage in sharply unkind appearance-based self-criticism; this behavior is exquisitely practiced. As George Orwell said, "Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip."
Women my age are invisible, are supposed to be invisible, and here I was more shiningly, publicly visible than I had maybe ever been before in my life. (Certainly my backside was much more visible!) I had not only refused to turn my little somersault, whip or no whip, I had broken free of my ring entirely and was running around the big tent, barking cacophonously and threatening to pull down all the red-and-white-striped fabric with my tiny chihuahua teeth. How ridiculous, indeed. And …. come on! How magnificent! How stupendously glorious! How genius to re-write the words just the way I wanted to dance to them, to be my own "backless dress and some beat-up sneaks/my discotheque Juliet teenage [middle-aged] dream."
The reality is, if you've got even a speck of anything wonderful inside you it will alienate someone to let it out. It will shame you nearly breathless just imagining it. Your mind will chatter away with over-rehearsed anticipatory cruelty. You'll stand in the mirror, shamefaced and itchy for that crack-and-sting on your backside, jumpy, ready to turn backflips with embarrassment. And you have to shake it off. You have to do it anyway. If you want to film a movie dancing on the beach, you have to look at the cliff face and your octogenarian bare feet and find someone's hand to hold while you climb on down.
Wear the sequins. Wear the 10-inch boots. Take your empty femme instruction manual and scribble all over the pages. It'll be great. We live in the future. They have tape you can hold up the bridges with here.