Sheer Envy
May 5, 1999
Lately I’ve been watching MTV with my sixteen-year-old son in an obvious effort to bond in the most simple, non-active way possible. And I think I’m jealous of Cher: how can this be?
Cher is a fifty-two year old woman; she used to be Sonny and Cher and now she’s a teen-market star with a successful music video and she can wear those little halter tops that only look really good if you’re 10 or a car hop. Clearly the only halter top anyone’s going to offer me will have a bit and reins.
Of course, I’m jealous. I’d redo “young” in a heartbeat if I could keep everything I know now. I don’t envy Cher any of her failed personal life because nobody envies the personal life of a rock star, but I do envy her the energy it takes to continue to pretend to be a virgin.
It’s her job, the thing she does instead of going to the office everyday. In the video, she’s wearing this kind of Aztec looking headdress and she’s in some sort of disco with all these nubile young things jumping around and occasionally we get the blurred shot of Cher like Doris Day used to have in her close-ups when she wore those cute, fur-collared suits and those high, high heels, and Cher reaches out her long be-manicured fingernails desperately like she’s reaching out for something—it’s like a dream you would have when you’re, frankly, an old lady wishing you were young again, and you aren’t.
Being old is like being nine months pregnant—there is no pleasant way out. But how humiliating it must be to have to cavort in front of one of those fuzzy lenses that have Vaseline smeared all over them, I don’t care how much money she’s making, women our age don’t care about looking like a 22-year-old anymore. It’s too much work.
My 60-year-old friend in Palm Springs, Linda Lee Lennartz, a liberated woman who told me when I was 12 that I could actually call her “Linda Lee” instead of Mrs. Lennartz, warned me recently to never let my hair go gray because no one would talk to me anymore. Is it true that the older you are, the more you match the color—and job description—of the sidewalk?
In discussing life with my over-fifty crowd of used-up women friends, we find the greatest bliss of old age, and actually I think of the fifties as the adolescence of old age, is that you no longer care about so many things that you thought were important in your thirties. “The perfect life” starts to sort of pale when compared to grandchildren, good friends and great memories. The fact that so many of our must-haves were unattainable turns out to be OK. Self-acceptance doesn’t seem to mean that you’ve given up. It’s no longer such a huge valley to cross between the struggle to be respected and the desire to be happy.
But it’s also true that the greatest fear of aging isn’t that you’ll die, it’s that you won’t matter anymore. It’s hard to feel that you might have to let go of your voice as responsibilities go to younger people, as the world that once was your oyster now seems to be on someone else’s plate.
It’s also hard to find out just where you belong sometimes when you have a healthy body and mind and an urge to follow a different drummer. It’s a disconcerting time, much like being a teenager because there are so many more choices. Fifty years ago, you retired, you got fat, did a little gardening and you died. Now you can be a senior Olympian, manger at McDonalds, a world traveler, a valued business consultant or Cher. And you might plan on living to be 100. What do you do?
I asked my son Clay if he thought of Cher as a role model. He does, in a way, admire the fact that she’s stretching the boundaries of what you can do after forty. But Clay is also embarrassed by Cher’s antics. I wonder if the next generation will become conservative and scared of looking foolish because the baby boomers were so outlandish.
To use a cliché, Cher is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is that society is changing and aging doesn’t fit any of the accepted paths anymore. In our last presidential election, the younger man won, beating a man who a few years ago would have been retired. That Dole is now the national spokesman for Viagra probably says more about the paradox of our new expectations than almost anything else.
Lately I’ve been watching MTV with my sixteen-year-old son in an obvious effort to bond in the most simple, non-active way possible. And I think I’m jealous of Cher: how can this be?
Cher is a fifty-two year old woman; she used to be Sonny and Cher and now she’s a teen-market star with a successful music video and she can wear those little halter tops that only look really good if you’re 10 or a car hop. Clearly the only halter top anyone’s going to offer me will have a bit and reins.
Of course, I’m jealous. I’d redo “young” in a heartbeat if I could keep everything I know now. I don’t envy Cher any of her failed personal life because nobody envies the personal life of a rock star, but I do envy her the energy it takes to continue to pretend to be a virgin.
It’s her job, the thing she does instead of going to the office everyday. In the video, she’s wearing this kind of Aztec looking headdress and she’s in some sort of disco with all these nubile young things jumping around and occasionally we get the blurred shot of Cher like Doris Day used to have in her close-ups when she wore those cute, fur-collared suits and those high, high heels, and Cher reaches out her long be-manicured fingernails desperately like she’s reaching out for something—it’s like a dream you would have when you’re, frankly, an old lady wishing you were young again, and you aren’t.
Being old is like being nine months pregnant—there is no pleasant way out. But how humiliating it must be to have to cavort in front of one of those fuzzy lenses that have Vaseline smeared all over them, I don’t care how much money she’s making, women our age don’t care about looking like a 22-year-old anymore. It’s too much work.
My 60-year-old friend in Palm Springs, Linda Lee Lennartz, a liberated woman who told me when I was 12 that I could actually call her “Linda Lee” instead of Mrs. Lennartz, warned me recently to never let my hair go gray because no one would talk to me anymore. Is it true that the older you are, the more you match the color—and job description—of the sidewalk?
In discussing life with my over-fifty crowd of used-up women friends, we find the greatest bliss of old age, and actually I think of the fifties as the adolescence of old age, is that you no longer care about so many things that you thought were important in your thirties. “The perfect life” starts to sort of pale when compared to grandchildren, good friends and great memories. The fact that so many of our must-haves were unattainable turns out to be OK. Self-acceptance doesn’t seem to mean that you’ve given up. It’s no longer such a huge valley to cross between the struggle to be respected and the desire to be happy.
But it’s also true that the greatest fear of aging isn’t that you’ll die, it’s that you won’t matter anymore. It’s hard to feel that you might have to let go of your voice as responsibilities go to younger people, as the world that once was your oyster now seems to be on someone else’s plate.
It’s also hard to find out just where you belong sometimes when you have a healthy body and mind and an urge to follow a different drummer. It’s a disconcerting time, much like being a teenager because there are so many more choices. Fifty years ago, you retired, you got fat, did a little gardening and you died. Now you can be a senior Olympian, manger at McDonalds, a world traveler, a valued business consultant or Cher. And you might plan on living to be 100. What do you do?
I asked my son Clay if he thought of Cher as a role model. He does, in a way, admire the fact that she’s stretching the boundaries of what you can do after forty. But Clay is also embarrassed by Cher’s antics. I wonder if the next generation will become conservative and scared of looking foolish because the baby boomers were so outlandish.
To use a cliché, Cher is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is that society is changing and aging doesn’t fit any of the accepted paths anymore. In our last presidential election, the younger man won, beating a man who a few years ago would have been retired. That Dole is now the national spokesman for Viagra probably says more about the paradox of our new expectations than almost anything else.
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