To Being Weathered and Alive

Or, what to do with your wings

🦻If you prefer to listen rather than read, I’ve recorded this newsletter above

Photo by Rachel McDermott on Unsplash

As a very young actress I was cast in a play alongside two young men. The casting director, who was the only woman in a position of power at the theatre, came up to our small company on the first day of rehearsal and gushed over my cast mates, ignoring me altogether. I would see this kind of behavior from her many times over the years. What she was teaching me, intentionally or not, is that in a society where men have the easiest access to power, women must compete for the remaining resources. Women and anyone else who doesn’t fit neatly inside the binaries and margins laid out for us. She was teaching me to accept the Way Things Are. The world is not a place of abundance, but of winning or losing. She will win and you will have to lose. I’m sure she exists in various forms in every career path and stage of life. The woman who simply cannot believe that there is enough for all of us.

Photo by Dogancan Ozturan on Unsplash

On a breezy Saturday in Atlanta, I rode Marta to midtown to meet another woman, “J” for lunch. J directed me many years ago and I hadn’t seen her since well before the pandemic. When you pick right back up with someone after years apart is how you know the friendship took, like a Spring bulb coming up year after year. You knew it was there, you remembered how lovely it was but you’d let yourself doubt it might come back.

You’re probably familiar with J’s prolific acting work on Broadway or from films or television. She’s a been a big deal for decades but as she’ll tell you, she’s not a Movie Star. She’s had an incredible career, raised two children, become a wonderful director, gracefully navigated professional waters with some straight up jerks, and can still do her own grocery shopping. Goddess, in my book.

I see most of the women I’ve been lucky enough to work with as Eagles. But with machetes. Eagles with machetes. Nestling me under one strong nurturing wing, and with the other wing, clearing space for more of us. With their Eagle machetes. They’ve shown me the kind of woman I want to be in this business. The way I want to use my own wings. They’ve also now given me a business idea for Eagle Machetes.

In my late 20s and early 30s, I’d look to J as one of my mentors (Idols?) and wonder how I could hop directly into her footsteps. Openly telling me stories of the struggles along the path, she’d often stop short of offering much direct advice, or anything close to what I really wanted which was - JUST TELLING ME HOW TO DO IT. How do I keep climbing the ladder. Tell me what the next mountain top will look like. Give me the key to the gate. Why won’t she just tell me what to do? I remember thinking.

When we are starting on the path, it’s so easy to think that the answers matter more than the questions. We look for any bypass on the search, any bridge that might shoot us straight to certainty. As though the path itself won’t determine where we go. What we go to. As though the path, the questions, the search are not the Thing itself.

A few years ago, J told me, she was reading for one of the buzzy-awardsy films of the year. She’d been called to audition for a small role over zoom but they decided at the last minute to have her read for one of the leads.

Let’s pause a moment here to let it sink in that there was a Big movie that had multiple roles for women over 60.

Moment of blessed silence.

Okay, thank you for that, where was I.

“I was so mad!” She told me. “They’re never gonna cast me in this role. I know they’ll cast a Movie Star. Well fine, I told myself, I’ll just make them wish they could cast me!” We laughed. I pondered all the times she must’ve had those thoughts in her career. A Tony award winner, a regular on television screens, years of work under her belt, all the One Jobs that must’ve gotten away from even her.

She booked it, y’all. She made them wish they could cast her, so they did. This is not the story of a Big Break. This is the story of an Eagle with a machete. Can you imagine offering an Eagle with a machete a big break? She would laugh at you, I’m afraid.

While filming, the director told her, “it’s so good you haven’t been all botoxed and lifted! Everyone reading had had too much work done.” And we laughed about that too. More weathered old lady stories, we said.

Yet it’s another way women are told we have to compete, isn’t it? Look as young as you can for as long as you can. Look at the Movie Stars. I whole heartedly understand those who follow this unspoken rule. But at a certain point, for some projects at least, they’re going to need women who have let their faces relax into themselves, faces showing the signs of things they have done in this world. It’s another way we just can’t win.

If the world is about winning and losing, anyway.

I confided my insecurities about choosing to not get injections. I’m using sunscreen and eye cream and retinol with the best of ‘em, but I too shall one day be a weathered old lady. I looked across the table at this beautiful, alive human. It’s amazing how a single beautiful, alive human can make you look forward to what most of society says you should be afraid to become. Here in middle age, mid-career, mid-child-rearing, mid-wherever-you-happen-to-be-on-this-planet - “You are in the middle,” the voice from nowhere seems to say, “begin your decent into invisibility.” But I look at J and she is visible, visual, I want to see her, she is being seen.

It was my favorite film that year. How thrilling to watch an Eagle soar in the clearing of all the more glamorous stages of our industry. An Eagle who’s been flying, nurturing, machete-ing for some time. She kept calling it “a lovely period” to her career. (Though she was in Atlanta working… you know it’s real easy to turn a period into a comma. Just sayin’, J.)

More often now, I’m taking my turn having lunch, coffee with younger actresses. They want to pick my brain. They have a longing I recognize. They want me to tell them how to keep climbing the ladder. They want to know what the next mountain top will look like. They wonder if I will give them the key to the gate. It makes me understand now why J could never just tell me what to do. I love their questions and they remind me to love my own.

I recall the first time I saw J on stage, she walked into the light and I began weeping. For several days after I wondered why I did that. Finally it came to me, it’s the thing Thurgood Marshall meant when he said “don’t worry about what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive then go do that because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” That feeling when you see someone right where they’re supposed to be. She walked onstage and instinctively I knew the world was coming alive because she was so alive.

She paid for my lunch that Saturday in Atlanta, her generous protective wing shooing away the reach for my wallet, because “I’m working! And… not to brag, but they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

“Brag!” I told her. “Brag, brag, brag! You’ve earned it. Gives me something to look forward to!”

To being weathered and alive and still filled with the questions. To offers I can’t refuse. To friendships that keep and wings that protect and expand the world.

To being weathered and alive and filled with the questions. To offers I can’t refuse. To friendships that keep and wings that protect and expand the world.

Photo by Vonecia Carswell on Unsplash

And now, your weekly bonuses…

Notable and Quotable

“The often fleeting but fully memorable gift of escaping the small self long enough to glimpse a wholeness more real than the most real brokenness.”

~Barbara Brown Taylor

AND

“There are gonna have to be some actors left who can play the old craggy women. You know? And you cannot apply craggyness to a good, lifted, botoxed face.”

~Cherry Jones

One Obsession Away

Wherein I share what I am obsessed with this week.

Purses that look like a picnic waiting to happen.

Got these two secondhand: Poshmark and some thrift store.

(Where are my fellow Thrifties?? We can make friendship bracelets out of beads from a thrifted necklace.)

But for real. Why not constantly feel like a cheese and wine spread is waiting for you on a checkered blanket in a field of Black Eyed Susans AT ALL TIMES. The possibility of transporting there just by putting something over your shoulder is winning to me.

Obsessed.

Out: Purses, Pocketbooks, Shoulder Bags.

In: Picnic Chic.