“I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn’t itch.” – Gilda Radner
“Gradually I started to…recognize the fact that I had been repeating patterns I learned in my childhood. Once I realized where they were coming from and saw they weren’t inevitable in the present, I was less likely to repeat them. I began to find pleasure in staying home, and I made all the changes in my life that sound so simple. From that experience I learned that to be defiant about age may be better than despair – it’s energizing – but it is not progress. Actually, after fifty, aging can become an exciting new period; it is another country.” – Gloria Steinem
I agree, which is why when we find them, we need to talk about and publicize them. Here’s a gallery of Gloria Steinem who is now around 70 and smart, good-looking, confident and productive:
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1366&bih=641&q=gloria%20steinem&tbs=isch:1
Lynne, I’m not sure if this is universal, but I think the problem is that after say-forty, we don’t have a lot of positive role models. As “young uns,” we didn’t bother looking for them (everybody over 30 was suspect!), and now, everybody in our parents generation seems so OLD!! True, many seniors are active, healthy, volunteering, alive, but so many more are “dead,” either in reality or in in all practical senses of the word. So we find ourselves wondering about our existence, how to make meaning of it, how to make a lasting impression that we were here and that we mattered. Perhaps that’s why so many folks in the forty-plus age group are scrambling to stay young — with exercise, makeup, lipo, botox, whatever!