IN MY SHOES: Keeping My Inner Bag Lady At Bay
Author and talk radio host Judith Warner writes in Times Select (subscription required) about how reading Nora Ephron’s new book, "I Feel Bad About My Neck," prompted her to look more closely in the mirror than she had bothered to before:
[L]ike Ephron, throughout most of my life, I was always a "low maintenance" kind of a woman, as my very blond college classmate Cate once kindly put it. … I was a great fan of makeup. I just couldn’t remember, most days, to put it on. …
But then, something happened right around the time I turned 41. I was the maid of honor at Cate’s wedding. And when the wedding photos arrived, I saw for the first time that my face was full of lines. Vertical lines, creases running down from both sides of my mouth and into my neck. A full face of professional wedding makeup hadn’t hidden them. …
I’d crossed over into the country of women who Have to Do Something About Their Appearance. The question was what, followed soon after by musings as to why.
The first part of the answer was easy: I grew my hair longer and got highlights. …
When you hear stories about middle-class people who fall into bankruptcy because of, say, medical bills or the costs of caring for an elderly relative or, often enough, divorce, you realize that, unless you’re very, very wealthy or very, very lucky, you are really only one or two bad strokes of luck away from falling off the rails yourself. I feel this quite acutely.
Which is why, I think, many of us – even women like Ephron, who on the surface of things has no right to such worries as she strides past the homeless on her way to her biweekly blow-dry – have our own inner bag ladies. …
The bag lady threatens. She’s a menace. And we need whatever armor money can buy.
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