I Feel Bad About My Neck, by Nora Ephron is quite the book, and the reader feels as if she/he is going on a bit of a roller coaster ride, between tears and laughter.

This wicked and divine book, which is a cross between poignant/serious and outright hilarious, brings much comic relief to women who are aging. With Ephron’s sensible, yet comedic style (after all, she did bring us When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle), we are infused with scents, creams, lotions and bath oils, and her verbal quips where she states: “I’m as smooth as silk”.

Ephron’s book chronicles the downfall (literally) of a woman’s aging body, from sagging breasts and chins, to thinning hair and thickening necks. Each page is crammed with ounces and pounds of laughter and tears, each story/piece a gem of its own, causing smiles to form on our faces…adding a few more wrinkles with each smile (which is no reason to pull that sweater up to your chin).

Nora Ephron is not getting older gracefully, and admits it. Nothing she does can slow the process down…and she is fighting back at it every second and hour of the day.

If you want to feel bad about yourself, I Feel Bad About My Neck is a must read, and if you want to feel good about yourself, and laugh your way through those bad feelings, the book is also a must read.

I personally own and have read this delightful book.
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Jew Wishes…Peace to you all.
© Copyright 2007 – All Rights Reserved – No permission is given or allowed to reuse my photography, book reviews, writings, or my poetry in any form/format without my express written consent/permission.

She turns fifty today…this queen who started it all.  The sexy bad girl of the eighties paved the way for so many nubile babes with wiggling, barely covered crotches who longed for a chance at stardom.  The only difference is that Mama Madge could actually sing.  (Yes, I thought she gave a fantastic performance in Evita…a belief that caused much grief for me at Friday happy hours.)

And, except for that unfortunate appearance on Letterman in the mid-90’s, she’s been able to sell the sex without publicly trashing her soul.

Now comes the ‘Sticky and Sweet’ tour.  Way to go, you material mid-lifer you!  Can’t wait to see what you do when you’re sixty.

One of the most horrifying thoughts I’ve been known to have concerns who will find my body? I mean if I should die before I wake, who will find my body?

A few years back, I was sitting in the hair salon, probably hour 2 out of a four-hour stint — you know how that goes — and two of the women in other stylists’ chairs started chatting about one of their sorority sisters, a widow with no children. Apparently, she’d been dead in her apartment for a couple of days before anyone thought to look for her or thought to panic about her whereabouts.

She was a schoolteacher who had developed a pattern of extreme punctuality and responsibility. While she was never late, she was never absent. And had it not been for a secretary at her school who became alarmed when she didn’t show up, who knows how long her body would have gone unfound.

Of course, the two women getting their hair done probably sensationalized much of what they shared about their sorority sister’s death, but my imagination sensationalized even more. A thin veil of sweat formed over my eyebrows as I began to think, That could be me! 

I’ve often given myriad reasons why I should be married but as I mature, heck, get older, I put at the top of that list: Someone to find the body. Now when I’m dead that will not mean a hill of beans to me, especially the possibility of some neighbor, landlord or other smelling my decaying carcass and then notifying the proper authorities or next of kin.

I’m not even sure which of my next of kin should be notified. My favorite cousins live out of state. My goddaughter who is my beneficiary of record shouldn’t be the one to have to identify my remains or prepare my funeral. Frankly, it doesn’t seem like a fair exchange: All of my earthly belongings for the privilege of preparing me for burial.

The best possible scenario is that I develop pneumonia, have to be hospitalized and then go peacefully under the care of individuals who are accustomed to dealing with dead bodies. Right? That does make more sense to me.

What doesn’t make sense to me is dying alone. In all of the sickness of my humor and morbidity of my thoughts, I simply do not want to die alone.

It makes me wish I’d placed more value on life and my future when I had an abortion. If I’d just had a live birth, I’d have a next of kin, one I’d hope cared enough about their mother to bury her properly or even miss the body.

It makes me wish I’d not been so adventurous and free-spirited in my youth, and married the boy who loved me enough to put me through college if only I’d marry him and stay home. I left.

It makes me wish I’d married the man who bored me to tears though he was a good man and would have provided for me well.

It makes me wish I didn’t have to think about this at all.

But if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my panties are clean and my apartment is in order, as well as my paperwork. My vanity will not allow me to be found in a state of disarray and yucky. I pray the Lord gives me enough heads up, so I can straighten up a bit for the person who finds the body.

Such a cheery thought…

(photo from here)

old age is attractive to me.

a head of white hair, red lipstick, wearing turbans, smoking cigarettes hand-rolled by lover, owning a camel, showing up at bella’s piano recital with 10 lbs of necklaces and fingers layered with rings (including a queen min ring), and saying fabulous things that stick to walls.

***

i really like renata mohlo. 

here she is in her own words: 

the sart: dress to impress who?
rm: Myself: in the meaning that dressing for me is just a way to share the space with others, so sometimes I feel like giving a strong contribute to the picture, and sometimes I just need to be transparent, to pass through without making any noise. But it’s always referred to my mood in relation to the others.

***

from fashion indie:

On why no one should go to fashion school:

“These schools today are pretty useless. They are very theoretical. What do you need theory for? Nothing. What you need is experience, to have lived and seen and done other things in life. I taught for a while and I used to tell my students: ‘Seeing one picture by Chagall is much more important than reading all the issues of Vogue ever published.’”

On what happened after the magical ’80s ended:

“Everything turned into a soulless homage to other things we had seen before. Think about the era of successive revivals that began after the 80s. For example, even today in most runway shows the music is nothing but a mix of 60s, 70s, and 80s music. It’s a big empty hole. Nothing is exciting anymore, and most things are tremendously boring. Often, the best things are written by unknown editors and journalists, while the big names seem to sign things off with their left hand. Haven’t you noticed that nobody expresses an opinion anymore?”

quote by stendhal.