Pimp That Post!

Which is what I'm doing right now: pimping my most recent post for More.com....in which I whine about why I'm bad at pimping (my mama done brought me up right)--and why it's crucial to this here internets thing.

The drill is this: go read the post (okay, you don't have to read it; just look at it). Click on the "I Like This" icon (you may have to sign up first but only the first time and honestly, you'll be entered in a contest to win Michael Jackson's sixth grandchild.) Then comment....and send the link to your friends... Because the more People Who Like my post, the--the--the ------- Whatever.

And then--no, we're not done yet!--Digg it and Stumble it. Those two are easy 'cause there's links to them right on the post.

I thank you.....

Jon & Kate Plus 8: Hang 'em from the highest tree

I just finished the season opener of Jon & Kate Plus 8. It was painful to watch, especially for anyone who has gone through the breakup of a marriage. Clearly they are each putting on the Brave Face that I remember so well from my own life, and that, perhaps, makes it harder for me at least to see. I get the sense that they are both doing the best they can in a crummy situation.

Meanwhile, the citizens are milling about yelling, Jump! Jump! Or maybe, to make the metaphor I'm reaching for clearer, Off With Their Heads!

I am astonished at the hysteria that this family has generated in the tabloid press, and thus on line, and therefore in Twitters and Facebooks etc. etc. etc. For a while public sentiment was against Jon, the doubledealing, cheating, oh-my-god-he-got-hair-plugs, what-does-he-do-for-a-living-anyway husband. But now, now Kate is on the rack because...because--

...because she's a woman and she isn't meek. I have a couple of book shelves full of most worthy historical assessments of the role of women, with titles like Disorderly Conduct, The Female Grotesque, and (one of my person favorites) The Madwoman in the Attic. They are all a testimony to the fact that in our culture, we have not wanted our women bold and beautiful and we have certainly not wanted them smart and articulate. Kate Gosselin fails on all four points, and thus she must be chastened, scourged, and maybe even burned at the stake.

As always, it amazes, saddens and disgusts me that it is mostly women who are casting the stones. Lord, how we love to hate each other. And we're so good at it, aren't we? While little boys bash each other over the head to establish dominance in the sandbox, we girls do it with sly innuendo and backbiting. We're the master (if I can use that word) of the verbal assault because really, that's the only ammunition our culture has allowed us.

I don't know what will happen to the Gosselins. I wish them well. I wish their period of time being scapegoats for the American shadow psyche is brief. I wish we weren't all so fucking eager to raise the flag and then, just when it's flying high, pull it down to trample it in the muck. I don't know--I guess I wish we weren't so human.

Midlifebloggers: Fashion for the Forty and Over Set.

What's your opinion on that? I've been reading More magazine and frankly, it's pissing me off. Last month Lesley Jane Seymour devoted her Editor's Column to dressing one's age. She described standing behind a woman at a hotel in Hollywood and trying to figure out how old she was by the visual cues: long blonde hair meant 40, mini skirt pushed it to 35, and bright colors signalled "under 30, for sure." Then the woman turned around and revealed

"(cue screech music from Psycho) a woman of a certain age who was trying desperately . . . to avoid looking a certain age. . . .Being of a Certain Age myself, I felt terrifically sad that this woman had gazed out over the fashion landscape and seen no appealing style stops between Thirty-Five and...Dead. . . .deliberately dressing 20 years younger than your birth date is setting yourself up to commit a kind of sartorial shock and awe."

It's taken me a month to stop sputtering at the slings and arrows that Seymour was flinging at me and every other woman who doesn't fit the New York fashion world's version of what she calls "Age Appropriate Style." What does that mean, anyway? Seymour asks us these questions: "If you have great legs, should you still show them off at 60? If your arms are trim and fit, can you go sleeveless at any age?" Hell, yes, I say. I certainly don't want to scare Seymour (or anyone else who is standing behind me in line), but my hair is long and my skirts are not because that's the way I want them. I have thought both issues through and I'm sure of my reasoning, and it has nothing to do with trying to look younger.

What bothers me so much about Seymour's edicts is that More is the only mainstream publication that focuses consistently on midlife women. They do a good job of offering articles that encourage us to take chances, break out of the box, go for as full a life as you can possibly imagine. But this encouragement clearly doesn't extend to our physical selves since the magazine offers a steady round of stick thin models wearing designer clothing. I don't know about you, but this midlife woman hasn't been stick thin since she was in her thirties, and she cannot afford, especially in this economy, $1500 dresses and $800 shoes.

So here's my challenge. How are you dressing these days? For comfort? For fashion? For yourself or your significant other? Think about it; maybe you have some photos to share. I'll publish all that I get on MidLifeBloggers.com. Let's turn that into the fashion magazine for midlifers, the one no one else is publishing.

The Women: a review

My gang of eight went to see The Women last night, and we liked it. We really liked it. It made us laugh and afterwards we discussed how our opinions could so differ from the critics, who panned it. I think it's the critics' problem. I wonder what they were expecting to see that the film so disappointed them: Anna Karenina set to music?

BlogHer'08: Just the first night...

Shallow as I am, I must confess that the parties and the socializing were the raison d'etre of BlogHer'08 for me. But then I announced that ahead of time, didn't I.

I meant to go to the Guy Kawasaki/Kirtsy party on Thursday night, but it was a tad difficult to get to. They had hired buses to take us from the St. Francis to Guy's house in Atherton. Good thinking, that. Not so good was the rush hour traffic, the 30 mile trip, and the bus driver who got lost. I got to the appointed pickup area at about 5:15 or so. Evidently I just missed a bus. The one with the bus driver who got lost. At 5:30, someone came out and told us the buses were "running slow and late." The earliest the next one would be there was 5:45, if then. And it would take, oh, another three quarters of an hour, if not more since it was smack in the middle of rush hour, to get to Guy's. Why didn't we wait inside, it was suggested, since this was San Francisco, and it was cold and windy outside. I did some mental math and decided that no matter how much I wanted to meet Guy (and thank him for putting the Midlife category on Alltop), I probably wouldn't be all that pleasant when I finally got there. So, yeah, I bagged it. And it was my loss, as I hear from those who went.

The two parties I did make it to on Thursday night were BlogHer's Newbie Party and The People's Party. The Newbie Party was quite lovely. Open bars...waiters passing endless amounts of finger snacky things--which was good, since I'd missed dinner. I feared, this not being my first but my THIRD BlogHer Conference, that I would be turned away from the Newbie Party. But would BlogHer do that? No way. I wish there had been a Newby Party the year I was a Newby, although that year we all hung out by the pool at the San Jose Hyatt, so meeting people wasn't that much of a problem. Still, it's nice to have the weekend begin with a celebration. I was with Melissa Silverstein at the Newby Party and we talked to Stephanie Klein, who told us about her new book, Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp. Clearly Stephanie has mastered forever the days when she needed Fat Camp, and she is now working on the tele- (or is it screen-?)play of her first book, Straight Up and Dirty. However, Melissa, who blogs about Women and Hollywood, was itching to meet some radical feminist BlogHers, so we went to The People's Party to see if the bra burners were hanging out there.

Everyone was hanging out at The People's Party, which was in a smallish room. Consequently, the noise level was ab-so-lute-ly unbelievable. The People's Party was loud, people. Make that LOUD. Make that Ear Assaulting Pain Inducing Loud. I must confess that I was somewhat embarrassed, nay humiliated even, that a room full of my fellow female bloggers sounded like the aural definition of the word cacophony. Our voices hit a decibel register that, well, that approaches a cackle, as heard through a superbowl sized megaphone. A Superbowl Cackle, a chorus of Cackles.


This noise level issue was a problem at the St. Francis all weekend. I cannot believe that a room full of men sounds so dreadful. If it did, I'm sure the acoustical engineers would be trotted out instantly to do whatever was necessary to amend the problem. But since it was just a room full of women--like, how often is that going to happen? Let them eat cake, as it were. Let them go deaf listening to their shrill selves. Let them.....whatever.

MidLife Bloggers - We're Here!

There's a conversation going on at BlogHer that I've been having with myself for more than a year: Where are all the middle-aged women bloggers? | BlogHer?
Cecelia over at MetaFootnotes started it several weeks ago when she introduced herself to BlogHer. She wrote about trying to find "a voice that I want to hear." That voice is of a woman in her midlife (fill in the age range yourself; these days when 60 is the new 50 and 50 is the new 40--who knows).

"I'll admit it. I envy the mommybloggers. Twenty years ago . . . I would have found those sites a lifeline, a very Godsend. But, despite the obvious fact that theirs are among the most powerful and prolific voices on the Web, the Mommys don't speak to or for me. I have different issues now, and I'd like to talk about them and hear others talk as well."

Cecelia finishes by putting a call out:

"If you are a woman of a certain age (and doesn't that sound better than middle-aged?) and know of blogs that talk comprehensively about this wonderful, frustrating stage of life, please let me know."

Almost four weeks later, we're still talking and the topic is getting stronger and stronger. I'm going to link at the end to all the women who have (thus far) taken part in the conversation, but in this post, I want to highlight a few voices, as well as my own experience.

I've been blogging for, I dunno, four years now (see how the memory goes!) and for much of that time I've felt like I am swimming upstream. Or--here's another metaphor--battering on a door, saying 'Let me in. Hear me. Speak to me.' The problem isn't ageism. There are blogs out there that speak eloquently to and for the Elders. BlogHer has a subcategory just for them and Denise, who's the Community Manager at Blogher, point to that site." However, I am not an Elder. My interests have nothing to do with issues of getting old and infirm and living on a fixed income.

My interests are more in line with Tanis, who doesn't have a blog yet (but should!):

"I'm looking for an arena to be heard and to listen. A place to discuss teenagers, new relationships and a not so new body, a busy career or lack of one. Self discovery, confidence, what to wear, family dynamics, alone time and what comes next in life."

I too want to see myself on BlogHer. I brought it up last year at BlogHer '07, and I was told that someone was going to be doing it. But someone isn't. Debra Roby of A Stitch in Time says that's because it's too broad a topic. Middle-aged women don't blog about their issues "any more than young bloggers specifically blog about what it's like to be a college student, or a quarterlifer." Well actually, Debra, young bloggers do blog about exactly that.

My sense is that the reason we midlifers aren't seen and focused on as a viable community within BlogHer is that the powers that be, the decision-makers of BlogHer aren't in our demographic. That's somewhere down the line, when I get older, but definitely not now, is what I imagine them saying. Now I'm about getting and doing and being and making and--wow! there's the whole world out there to conquer.

A good part of that conquering the world is making BlogHer a respected entity, building it into a viable player within the world of commerce. The Mommybloggers are at the top of the mountain, an acknowledged force to be reckoned with in terms of business, and an advertiser's dream. So in selling BlogHer, it's probably easier to sell them. Except--we, the midlife women, are a big, big piece of the advertising pie as well. We're the ones with discretionary income; we're the bigger spenders. So says Marti Barletta, who's known as the "First Lady of marketing to women" in her book PrimeTime Women: How to Win the Hearts, Minds, and Business of Boomer Big Spenders. This was the pitch that I made last summer after BlogHer, and this was the pitch that I guess was a dead ball. But I'm at it again.

As is Gena, from Out On The Stoop, issued a challenge to someone to "whip up a sample post and show folks what's needed." Karen from MidLife's A Trip, took her up on it. You can read her post as part of the comments here. She said something in one of her comments that really resonated with me. "I'm usually one of the oldest on the sites I visit--not a mommy blogger yet not an elderblogger either. It's kind of like being the middle child in a family--sometimes you feel like you don't quite fit in."

That's how I've felt. I'm not done being and becoming. I'm not finished have adventures, going places, trying and failing and trying again and, then, succeeding. In short, I'm not done living, and I want my site, my BlogHer to reflect that.

Here are some other midlife women who feel the same:
Carol at A Different Nest
Jill at Writes Like She Talks
Pundit Mom
Ladybeams
Anali at Analis First Amendment
JanMBSC
Rhonda at Recipe Carousel
Tara at The Princess and The Pea
Diary of a Midlife Crisis
Musing
Tiddlytwinks
Pamela Jeanne at Coming2Terms
Granny Sue

I can't tell you the exact age range of these women. Some are in their 40s, some 50s, some 60s. I can't tell you what all they write about either. There is no essential MidLife Woman, just as there is no essential Mommyblogger. What I can tell you is that they're looking for something they're not getting right now, a voice, and if not at BlogHer, then where?

Hungry Hill: A Memoir, by Carole O’Malley Gaunt

Hungry Hill: A Memoir, by Carole O’Malley Gaunt. University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.

Carole O’Malley Gaunt is quite obviously Irish, and center stage of her memoir is her alcoholic father. How much more does one need to know to slot it into the genre of memoirs that detail the ills the Irish child suffers at the hands of his or her drunken parent? Think the McCourts, for one. It seems that her publisher and her publicist are aiming at that audience. Here’s the back flap copy they’ve written to entice readers:

“The author recounts her sad and turbulent story with remarkable clarity, humor, and insight, punctuating the narrative with occasional fictional scenes that allow the adult Carole to comment on her teenage experiences and to probe the impact of her mother’s death and her father’s alcoholism.”

Just makes you want to run right out and buy the book, doesn’t it. If you said, no, then you would be missing something, because the deathly prose in Hungry Hill is confined to the jacket copy. O’Malley Gaunt herself is a talented writer whose way with words and faculty for specific details makes this story of her teenage years come alive as only the best of memoirists have the wherewithal to achieve.

I am not Irish and my parents were merely social drinkers, but I grew up in roughly the same era as O’Malley Gaunt details here, and I can tell you: she’s got it down, right to the penny loafers and the headbands. Time and again, she transported me back to that time and that place. Here’s Carole on a double date:

“…Richie leans over, looks at Gordie, and lifts his eyebrows, a signal if I ever saw one. When Gordie puts thirty cents down for their cokes, Kathy pulls out her wallet from her straw bag while I reach into the pocket of my Bermuda shorts for the exact change. Because Gordie and Richie do not fork money up for our sodas, my neck relaxes a little….Out on the street, a blast of hot air hits us as if the July heat had been waiting for a Friday night meltdown. As we walk up the street, Richie and Gordie talk about cars—engines, headlights, and prices, but I can’t tell one car from another and have only just learned what a tailfin is….In the middle of Newbury Street, while talking about the pits in chrome fenders, Gordie reaches for my hand. It’s not as if he’s going to lift my hand with its short fingernails to his lips and kiss it, after all this is Springfield, not Paree. But still I don’t like it.”

I was on that double date, only mine was in Pittsburgh and we had just come from Gammon’ s and what made me uncomfortable was the boys hooting and hollering at a sign in the butcher’s window: Breasts, 79 cents. But the straw bag, the Bermuda shorts, the endless talk about cars and such that we all listened to with such feigned admiration—she’s nailed it.

But if you’re not looking for a trip down memory lane, there are those other reasons to read this book. It has something to do with the fact that her mother died early and her father was a handsome alcoholic and she was the only girl with six brothers. But at heart, Hungry Hill is really a coming of age story. The specifics of her life are less important than watching her make her way through the landmines that are always waiting for young girls growing up. This is not to minimize the impact that her father’s drinking had on her, but really, it is more important to her now, probably. There is about those fictional scenes with the adult Carole and the parental figure who wronged her a Twelve Step patina that rings false with the intense truthfulness of O’Malley Gaunt’s written memories of the time.

Hungry Hill is, despite the jacket copy, not a “sad and turbulent story.” Far from it. It is a counter to the bloated tales we're getting of the good old days of the Sixties and Seventies, stories of the movers and shakers, as it were, by the movers and shakers of today. This, on the other hand, is just a book about a girl in a time and a place; it’s a window into Growing Up Girl then—and I suspect—now as well. And it captures the era far better than all the retrospectives in the glossy weeklies have done.

Thinking Pink and Thinking Green...

Here's a new why-I-haven't-blogged-recently excuse: the dog ate my homework...no, the dog ate my laptop...no, I can't decide which and what to write about so I just won't write anything. But this could go on for a very long time, so I'm grabbing the proverbial bull by the horns (as if) and writing Two Blog Posts In One....!

Post, The First: a disclaimer is required. I am very pro women, breasts, healthy women, healthy women with breasts and all that is required to keep them that way. I also, as you may recall, lost my best friend to breast cancer. Just saying that makes it sound like she went out in the cancer woods one day and never came home. Which isn't the case at all. She died, people, she died. Ten years after they cut off both her breasts. Okay, have I disclaimed enough to not infuriate all tender souls when I say:

I hate this bullshitty Pink for Breast Cancer month.

It has become a huge marketing ploy. Every company out there has done a pink something or other, which is now being advertised as the Must Have and by-the-way, we are giving .001 percent of our profit on each item to breast cancer research. And the magazines have jumped on the bandwagon. Pages and pages of glossy pink this and pink that. If we can make it in pink, hey, do it and jam it on the suckers in October, which is National Breast Cancer month. Just in time for the lead up to orange and black for National Halloween Month. And green and brown and orange for National Thanksgiving Month. And the all-time favorite, red and green for National Christmas Month. With a soupcon of blue and white for Chanukah and red, green andyellow for Kwanza Months.

Part of my anger is that I hate pink. I hate that pink is supposed to be so girly. I hate that I'm supposed to want everything in pink. I hate that young girls in my family are brainwashed into loveloveloving pink. Even Kayla, whose favorite color has always been black, lives in a Pepto Bismal colored room. Pink is insipid. Pink is but a pale washed out form of red. I hate that when men want to humiliate other men, they put them in pink. Pink is--hey, did you know that in former times pink was the boy's color; it was considered, as a derivative of red, too 'Hot' a color for girls. But I digress...

I am all in favor of corporations major and minor giving large chunks of change to breast cancer research. And I can understand their desire to have people know and appreciate their good works. But wouldn't a simple line of print on the label do? I can't stand they they're making money not only from our pain, but from our good nature and need to fit in (see me! I'm wearing a pink whatever. I'm in favor of women keeping their breasts!)

Pink camo T-shirts? I ask you--what jungle war would they be worn in? Or should they be given to our female soldiers, just to kinda mark 'em in the field? And pink soup cans--I see all those rows of washed out Campbell's soup and all I can think is, "blech! how long have they been sitting in the barn?"

I have quite worn myself out with that rant. I shall save Post, the Second for tomorrow...you lucky people.

Randomness from BlogHer'07

I should have live-blogged myself throughout the entire conference, because I was so full of wit and pith, little of which I can now remember.

If you read my post from the airport, you can imagine what a woeful camper I was on arriving in Chicago. There were two beautiful beds in my room at The W and just one beautiful me to sleep in them. But I hooked up for dinner with my old friends, Sueb0b of RedStapler, Karl of SecondhandKarl and Celeste of AverageJane. Drinks were had and food was eaten, and soon I started to feel a whole lot better about life in general and me in particular.

Still, when Elisa, Lisa, and Jory welcomed us at the General Session after breakfast, I got all teary. And at different times during the sessions. And then at the conclusion of the conference, when Cooper & Emily made their pitch for the power of us in BlogHer's community activism initiative. Here's why (aside from my admittedly 'iffy' state of mind): I felt bathed in a huge tub of support, caring, hey-I-like-you, what-do-you-think, all from hundreds of women who valued the things I think are important and who "get" what I do, immediately, organically, thoroughly. That kind of support for each other, particularly from such a wide range of women, is not merely feminism as usual. In fact, I'm from the Second Wave, so I go back to the early days of the women's movement, and I can tell you we have not always played so well together in the sandbox. Even last year, there was a pervasive feeling that many of us left with; Leahpeah calls it oogy. There was no oogy at BlogHer07. I don't know why. I don't think it much matters. I do think that Elisa, Lisa, and Jory have managed to created a huge (11,000 plus) grand group of women who are now a force to be reckoned with, both on the micro and the macro level. This is what we wanted back in the 60s and 70s. It took this long, and these particular women, and this communication tool for it to happen.

The sessions I went to gave me exactly what I wanted, generally speaking. I came. I saw. I laughed. I learned a bunch of technical stuff. Even the session on branding when I was told in no uncertain terms that I could not blog about politics and knitting did not dim my lights.

I met tons and tons of women. And got tons and tons of cards. And I'm not going to even start now naming them or linking them. I'm going to save that for tomorrow.

To Be Continued....