Beyond Clean Underwear – Advice from Mom
My mother’s advice extended far beyond bus-proofing my unmentionables. 
My mother’s advice was wise, witty, and right.
The first advice I remember her offering – (there were lots of “don’t touch that, you don’t know where it’s been; You’ll put an eye out; Your face will stick that way” warnings) – but this was the first grown-up advice, and it’s a subject dear to my superficial heart:
“Never go to the hairdresser looking like a slob. Always dress up and do your makeup. If you look like you don’t care about your appearance, the hairdresser won’t either.”
Very sensible.
Here are my favorites bits of Mom’s wisdom:
DATING. Mom’s dating advice served me well for many years. Of course it prevented me from marrying for many years too – but that turned out to be a good thing:
“Never play dumb to attract a boy. If he’s intimidated by your brains, you wouldn’t want him anyway.”
And
“Only date generous boys. If he’s cheap when he’s trying to impress you, just think how cheap he’ll be after you’re married.”
MARRIAGE. On the subject of marriage, there was lots of good advice:
“Never marry a doctor.” (This from my mother, the nurse) “They need to exude confidence to reassure their patients, but it spills over into their private lives. They think they know everything.”
“But on the other hand, if you insist on marrying a doctor, go for a dermatologist. They have very steady incomes. Their patients never die, but they never get better either.”
“Never disagree with your husband in public. There will be plenty of time later to tell him how wrong he was.”
and its corollary:
“Never let your kids pit you against your husband. Mom and Dad have to present a united front. It’s a matter of US versus THEM — and YOU (meaning us kids) are THEM.”
“”Don’t crowd your husband. Let him go out and have fun. He’ll come home happy. You do the same.”
LIFE. When it came to my personal development, Mom was practical and aspirational at the same time:
“Learn how to cook one thing really well. Serve it when you have company. You’ll look good.”
“Don’t try so hard to be like your sisters. We had you because we wanted something different.”
“You can do anything, You won’t be good at everything, but you can do everything.”
“Learn how to work sick. Life goes on no matter how you feel.”
“If you have to choose between getting a chore done and having fun, pick the fun. Years later, you won’t remember how many chores were done late, just how much fun you had.”
“Be as creative as you want, but also develop a skill to fall back on. I’ve never seen a want-ad for a poet.”
Good advice, right? Take it from a novelist/accountant who’s married to a generous non-physician. And I still get dolled up for a haircut. So does Mom.
Mom at 87
I’m a Good Tipper
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DEAR HAIRDRESSER:
Before you start, I’d like to share with you just a couple of my little “issues”:
- My face is really round.
- My eyes are close together.
- My eyebrows are going gray.
- I have a short neck, but an extra chin.
- My lips are too thin.
- I’m very pale. Except when I’m tan.
- My hair is fine at the temples, but thick at the back.
- Nobody has no body like me.
- One ear is just slightly lower than the other.
- I’m allergic to one kind of dye, but I don’t remember which one.
- I like my hair a rich, dark brown, or maybe blond. Redheads are nice.
- I like layers, but not too many layers. Or maybe a lot. Or maybe blunt.
- The back of my head is quite flat.
- I have a cowlick back there, so that spot is even flatter.
- The right side of my hair tends to flip up by itself.
- I like bangs. Long, but not too long. And fringy. You know, like that actress. You know… her. But only in that one movie, not the other one.
- I’m not very good with the blowdryer.
- Humidity makes my hair flop.
- Dry weather gives me the static flyaways. Like rubbing a balloon against my sweater.
- I have a photo here of a style I like. It’s longer than my hair, but the right cut might grow into that.
- I want to subtract a few years. Like twenty.
So now we’re ready.
Give me a hairdo that will correct/conceal/complement all of my little issues.
I know you can do it.
I’m a good tipper.
There’s A Hole in my Bucket (List)
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Famous People I have met:
1. Helen Hayes, 1981
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Famous People I almost met:
Several years ago, when my husband and I were house-hunting, we looked at a little house in Litchfield Connecticut. it was an eyebrow colonial – isn’t that an adorable term? I think it means that the second floor ceiling is at about eyebrow height. You could see through a few (half) of the stairs, and the kitchen floor was so slanted, that when you went from the refrigerator to the stove, it was hard not to break into a run down the slope. But it was a very very nice neighborhood.
A few months later we read in the paper that the next door neighbors had hosted a democratic fundraising event, and that the Clintons had stopped by. So if we had bought that house, and I hadn’t cracked my head getting out of the shower, or fallen through the stairs, or tumbled down the kitchen hill, I would have met Bill and Hillary.
There was a rather large hedge between the two houses, but towards the back there was a thin spot, so I am pretty sure I would have been able to squeeze through.
Image via Wikipedia
Dirty Dancing
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This is not about the movie, but I might as well go ahead and and gripe about it anyway.
Here’s something I’ve always wondered about Dirty Dancing. Daddy hates Johnny for sleeping with Baby. Then Johnny dances with Baby, and Daddy finds out that Creepy (sorry, can’t remember his name, and not worth googling) was the guy who got Penny pregnant. Daddy APOLOGIZES to Johnny. Huh? Just because Johnny can swing Baby over his head, and didn’t actually impregnate someone else, it is OKAY by Daddy for this partially-employed tight-shirted dude to sleep with his teenage daughter? Yeah, my daddy certainly would have felt the same way.
But I digress.
This is about MY dirty dancing. I am a fabulous dancer. In my own mind anyway. Now I’m not talking about the Fox Trot, or Tango, or Dirty Dancing’s Merengue (which I have no idea what that is). I admire ballroom dancing (especially Maksim Cmerkovskiy), but my ability in that form consists of what we used to call “slow-dancing”: moving my feet somewhat while hugging my husband.
No, I am talking about DANCING – hip swaying, pelvis thrusting, boob shaking, rock n roll dancing. I can MOVE!
Just strike up the intro to “Shout” and I’m a sexy, gravity-defying, rhythm genius. I prance, stomp, jiggle my girly parts like the exhibitionist I could never otherwise be.
My husband can’t really dance, and is self-conscious when I drag him to the floor for “Good Lovin'” But I don’t care. Dancing isn’t about him. It’s about ME.
Years ago (I’m thinking the mid-eighties), Chubby Checker performed at a local dinner club.
Image via Wikipedia
He may have been a little past his prime, but he could still triple-time twist. The audience sat at their tables and enjoyed the performance. Not me. I got up from the table and danced my ass off. My boyfriend of the moment appeared mortified. I did not care.
But now I am worried.
The youngest of my adult nephews is getting married. Here he is dancing with me at my wedding twenty years ago.
The wedding is still three months away, but I am already sad. This is the first wedding –and dancing–for me since I have turned the big Six-Oh.
Even in my own fantasy land, I can’t picture a sixty-year-old doing the fanny-wagging necessary to get the absolute most out of Mony Mony.
So I am retiring from the dance floor. I will miss it. My husband will be relieved.
Unless of course, my sister – mother of the groom and older than me – cuts loose. Then all bets are off.
The History of Lipstick, Chapter 60
Continuing the History of Lipstick, I’ve glossed over (pun intended) Chapters 2-59.
Here are a few of the chapters you have missed:
- Good Color, Bad Taste
- Tastes Great, Weird Color
- Moisturizing – Like Chalk
- Perfumed Enough for Pepe Le Pieu – And Right Under My Nose
- Cracks Under Pressure
- Gone in Sixty Seconds
- A Pink-To-Purple Chameleon
- The Drifter
- Melted at the Beach
- Sticks to My Teeth; To My Lips Not So Much
- Moonlights as Molasses
- Uncapped in my Purse – Subtitled: Kleenex Lint
So now I am at Chapter Sixty, a tragic tale you may know only too well:
- PERFECT – BUT DISCONTINUED
Oh yes. I found the perfect lipcolor. The shade is flattering, the durability is wonderful, the price is low.
It’s Maybelline’s 18-Hour Colorstay Lipcolor.
On one end is a color stain with a doe-footed (what a pretty term) wand. Apply. Let dry for a few seconds. Then apply the clear gloss on the other end. All I have to do is reapply the gloss after lunch. It really does last all day.
It’s Perfect. (Well, almost perfect – it doesn’t plump up my lips. But hell, nothing does.)
So a few weeks ago I am scraping the last of the color out with my little doe foot, and that’s it. Nothing. So I head on over to my favorite spot in the world – the cosmetic aisle at the drugstore, and that’s when I see it.
I don’t see it.
There is no Maybelline 18-Hour Colorstay Lipcolor.
There is now Maybelline 24-Hour Colorstay Lipcolor.
I’m good with this. I know this is a major sought-after breakthrough. When I get up at 3AM to pee (you just wait, you snickering whippersnappers), my lips will still look great.
But – the colors don’t match.
I am using a color that appears to be 775 – the font is really really tiny… at the narrowest end of its little nose. And I am now looking at a color that is called 150. This surprises me. I had no idea there were 625 shades between the pinkish-brown I have in my hand and the pinkish-brown I have at home.
But the color looks close to me, so I go ahead with my purchase. At home, on my own little lips, the color is a light tan. Now 1966 was a pretty good year, but I no longer have the poor-boy sweater and matching over-the-knee socks.
So the next time I go to the drugstore, I bring along the dead carcass of 775. Since 150 looked right, but turned out to be too pale, I find a color that’s just a little darker than my dear 775. I get home and it’s the right shade all right. But bedazzled. Despite what the magazines say about sparkly colors making thin lips look fuller, the real truth is that people think, sometimes aloud, “My, what sparkly little lips.”
On my third try at the drugstore, I brought 775 and the two rejects. I found a shade that could nestle among them pretty well, that looked dazzle-free. And it truly is pretty close – just plum-ier.
So now my frugal Maybelline lipcolor is one pricey mama.
But here’s the part that is crazy-making:
I BOUGHT THE FIRST, PERFECT LIPCOLOR IN DECEMBER!
IT’S AUGUST!
I GOT DISCONTINUED IN EIGHT MONTHS!
I feel quite like I did when Leon told me he would love me forever, but ten days later I saw him at the movies with Carol.
But I’m missing my old Maybelline 775 more than old Leon.
The History Of Lipstick, Chapter One
I wore lipstick on Easter Sunday, 1963. I was twelve.
In 1963, twelve was young for lipstick. None of my classmates were allowed. Only the grown-up girls. The eighth graders.
But that was the point. I had older sisters. I needed to be a teenager long before I was one.
My lipstick was pink. “Pink Cameo”, I think, from Cutex. 
This was Jackie Kennedy’s shade, or so I had read.
I bought it at McClelland’s Five and Ten for 39 cents. My first makeup purchase.
The makeup aisle at McClelland’s did not have all the makeup hanging from hooks, like stores today. Instead were long tables, with cubes holding the different products and brands: Maybelline, Cutex, Helen Rubenstein.
From the time I was nine, I had visited that table weekly, transfixed. How I coveted all those little tubes and compacts. I waited for the day when I could spend my allowance here, rather than at the candy counter.
I didn’t buy Pink Cameo on the sly. I had my mother’s permission. My mother was, and still is, wise. She knew I was heartbroken that my sisters were teenagers. And lipstick was a small consolation.
My mother didn’t worry. I looked like this:
Sort of a vacuous Anne Frank, with stupider hair. Pink Cameo wouldn’t make the older boys start hanging around my front yard.
And so I wore lipstick on Easter Sunday, 1963. I sang in the church choir. “Alleluia” – a skinny flat-chested daydreamer with bright pink lips.
Ten months later I turned into a teenager. The Beatles sang on the Ed Sullivan Show on my thirteenth birthday.
I still love The Beatles. I still love lipstick.
Old Lady Stuff I Like
On my post, Not Quite Old Enough For This, I listed lots of Old Lady stuff that gives me the Old Lady shingles – sandals with pantyhose, rainbonnets, etc.
However, I confess an affection for some truly Old Lady accoutrements:
Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds Cologne
My husband gave me this for Christmas about five years ago. Some dumb saleslady sold this to him, probably assuming I was as old as him. But he’s as old as the hills, whereas I am almost six whole years younger. I rolled my eyes when I unwrapped the gift. Old Lady Perfume? Not me! But you know, I kind of liked it. I wouldn’t admit it at first, but I started wearing it just once in a while (i.e., every day) and when the bottle ran out, I bought another. And another. And the body lotion. It’s still old lady perfume, but I smell nice. (This is an unpaid, unsolicited endorsement; but if someone wants to pay me, I would politely accept.)
The Slanket
Okay, I don’t have a Slanket. But for about ten months a year, I do wear a blanket while watching TV. And a blanket with sleeves would totally make it easier to do just about anything. Like snack. And look at the girl in this ad… she’s very very happy – and young too! This Fall, I am buying one for sure.
Pillboxes
My Great Aunt Lil always had a pretty pillbox in her purse. This is mine. My headache feels better as soon as I take it out. That’s called the synergistic effect in pharmacology. Medically proven.
Underpants
I didn’t get married until I was forty. That’s a lot of years to wear sexy underthings; you know—just in case. Bikinis, thongs, teddies: they look amazing. But can you sit in them? Soon after the honeymoon, I bought a supply of real underpants. Thank you, Costco.
Not Quite Old – Yoga
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My favorite part of Eat, Pray, Love –no wait—my favorite part was scarfing down all of Italy. Let me rephrase—the only part of “Pray” that I liked was one little paragraph where Elizabeth Gilbert describes her meditation. She’s really beginning to enjoy the mindful solitude of meditation. So much so that deep in the serenity of her meditation, she envisions her home with a separate room for meditation. “That’d be nice. I could paint it gold. Or maybe a rich blue. No, gold. No, blue…”
Yes, sir, that’s my baby. My yoga practice.
I love yoga. I’ve been practicing yoga for going on ten years now. I just wish I could clear my mind for more than five seconds.
In yoga, I strive to be completely in the moment. “If your mind wanders,” the instructor says, “just bring it back.” Well, my mind wanders. It stampedes. And bringing it back is like herding cats.
I arrive. I spread my mat and stretch. I try to get to that quiet place. Some of the other students are chatting. Who went where for vacation; how many people were drunk at so-and-so’s wedding. I smile. I’m smug. I’m preparing my mind while they are chatting. But of course, my mind is listening to some very interesting chatting.
We start. I breathe. I can focus on my breath. I’m really focused now. I wonder if I have turned off my cell phone.
My first downward dog. I can see the lady behind me this way. I like what she is wearing. It’s not too tight, and it’s quite stylish, for cropped sweats and a tank top. It does not matter what you wear to yoga, of course. Except it does. This spring I purchased a beautiful flowing yoga top and matching pants from an upscale yoga fashion website. It cost a fortune. I’ve been to twenty classes since I purchase my new extra-spiritual costume, and I’ve worn it once. Everyone wears cropped sweats and a tank top. So I do too. Stylish of course. Two weeks ago, I was so enamored of one tank top I purchased just for the class that I made sure I was up front near the teacher so all my fellow non-materialists could admire it. When I got home, I realized that I had it on inside out.
I can see just about everyone during sun salutation. I am the oldest person in the class. It is usually pretty easy to tell. But I see a lady who could be around my age. I check out her neck to determine if she is indeed older than me. Nope. Younger neck.
Contrary to almost every other situation in my whole world, I like being the oldest person in yoga class. If I keep up with all these younger chicks (and that one guy over there), then I can certainly be proud of myself. If I can’t keep up…well… after all, I am the oldest person in the class. It’s a win-win proposition.
Then it happens. At some moment during pigeon, or warrior, or goddess, I forget to think. I’m just my body, melting and strong at the same time. I love that moment. I love yoga.
Time for savasana. Release, relaxation, restoration. It’s so nice. It would also be nice to stop for a pizza on the way home.
Not Quite Old Enough For This – Postscript
A friend considerably younger than I took umbrage – politely, of course—with my inclusion of brooches as too old for me. She has for years enjoyed brooch-embellished jackets. I concede that an unusual pin is sometimes a nice addition to one’s chest. So I withdraw that weird purple brooch, and offer this instead:
Certainly I can get consensus that watch pins are too old. My young coworkers think I am old just wearing a watch in the normal place, never mind on my bosom, since cellphones provide a constant accurate time. My cellphone is not as simple to look at as my own wrist, however.
And as a reminder of the passing of time to whoever might be facing me, well, it’s upside down.
Another discussion has led me to also include The SHAWL – a garment strangely enough both TOO YOUNG and TOO OLD for me.
Not Quite Old Enough For This
I have accepted the fact that I am just too old for some things:
- Miniskirts
- Bikinis
- Body Glitter
- Visible bra straps
- Polka-dot manicures
- Bare midriffs
- Thigh high boots
- Pigtails (which I would never wear anyway)
- Navel piercing (which I would SO do, if I were twenty-five again)
It is with regret that I say goodbye to many of these things. “If you see me walking down the street, and I start to cry, each time we meet, walk on by…” The tears are mostly for miniskirts, as the young girls walk past me in the drugstore parking lot. My 1969 legs were unsurpassed.
But I have made a sort of peace with having outlived the body requirements for certain styles.
And it is a consolation that there are still some things for which I AM TOO YOUNG:
Elastic Waist Pants
Brooches
Theme Sweaters
Quilted Satin Slippers
Plastic Rain Hats 
Pantyhose with sandals
notquiteold 