Hair Today

As I was watching the old Karate Kid movie yesterday with 7 other people in one crowded room - call it vacation with children - I realized how much I miss the days when girls and young women had a little volume in in their hair, not like today when they all wear it slicked back like Louisa May Alcott.  And to think the kids look at our high school pictures and laugh. Wait another 20 years and see how they feel about their old hairstyles!)I mean seriously, here’s how the author of Little Women looked.It's just a tad severe, right? Even Jennifer Lopez looks bad, like a bunny with its ears cut off, without more hair around the face.I like hair like Elizabeth Shue had as Ali when she was offering Daniel-San the inspiration he needed (above.)Look at Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza:And OK maybe Demi Moore went a little too far when she was just starting outBut seriously: who doesn’t think Nicole Ritchie here doesn’t look a whole lot better than Jaime King?

Just sayin'!

OK it's another beautiful day on this my very last of vacation and little feet are thundering around on the other side of the wall. Time to dress in my Camp Director suit, fry up some bacon and kick everyone outdoors!

Now I Ask You

Don’t some people just look better with eye makeup? I didn’t know until I began doing a little television that when I laugh my eyes just disappear -  Poof and they’re gone, engulfed by the folds of skin around them. In fact, last time I want to the eye doctor she lifted up one of my impressively iguana-like upper lids and said “you know you can totally get your eyes done and insurance will pay for it.”  “Really? How’s that gonna happen?“ I asked. “Well pretty soon you won’t be able to see out from under a lid like this.” (A Lid Like This – nice title for a book -  about haberdashery maybe.)But look to your left here. In the top picture: the Plain Jane of all Plain Janes: Gloria Steinem as she looked graduating from Smith College in 1956 . In the  bottom picture: Gloria as she looks today with those signature dreamy eyes. It wasn’t until I met her in November and was given this book of some of her public utterances that I realized: sometimes what God forgets to give you, you can get from a bottle - or in this case a eyeliner pencil. I took a lesson I can tell you. Click on the “Play” symbol and see:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBu8A13aMw0]

Climb In It's Freezing

Gonna be COLD again today, so cold your tongue is gonna  freeze clear through when it touches your fillings.Lucky for me I got a jacket for Christmas that is brown and toasty and looks a lot like fur. In the old days if a lady had a fur she told the world; she wore the whole carcass right around her neck. Remember the little dead heads dangling down from ladies' throats in the old days? those ladies were PROUD ! Our mum could never pull off the snob thing herself. When she finally did inherit an old fur it was a mink-dyed muskrat which she made the mistake of saying once in front of us kids. From then on that’s all anybody called it.I also have a black jacket that might or might not be fur and - wait, is that a can of paint you're holding behind your back? - but since I mostly wear  brown these days, to go with my dye-job, Old Dave gave me this new one.Anyway here are the two jackets on my kitchen stairs the other night warming two younger members of my gene pool who had the nerve to call me “Carmela,”  as in Soprano, on account of this new gift. (I cut their heads off for revenge.  But tell ya what, when people are cold and they spot a piece of outerwear as toasty and lightweight as EITHER a mink-dyed muskrat OR a Gee-Beav-What-a-Nice-Shade-of-Brown, they don’t even put down their beers before climbing on in themselves!)

What Dressing Rooms?

I’m not done with the topic of fashion quite yet. Forget that whole post about the fashionistas, let’s talk Real World. My Real World truth is this:  I don’t care how popular Mad Men is, I don’t want to dress the way women they did in the early 60s. I did it once and the results weren’t pretty. That’s my mom on the left. That’s me beside her in the Porky Pig hat, I know, say no more, right? I wasn’t set free until the day came when I could  choose my own clothes and ride all the way to Boston on the train to do it, landing – where else? at Filene’s Basement where females dug fast as foxhounds through bins of newly discounted apparel and changed outfits right out there in the open.Filenes Basement closed in the summer of ’07, that wonderful get-it-for-a-song store in the bowels of its 1910 Boston building and for years as much of a tourist destination as the Paul Revere House over in the North End, as familiar to visitors as the Cheers bar just across the Common. I wasn’t much more than three the first time Mom took us there on a mission to buy her two little girls the ensemble that was the ‘look’ for all little girls in that far more formal era: a knee-length wool  coat, leggings to match and a little beaked hat. I remember we met Mom’s old friend and her two little boys at the Public Garden after, had a ride on the famous Swan Boats, had ice cream sundaes at Schrafft’s, then went to this woman’s apartment where the three-year-old peed on my leg, using this funny little faucet he pulled down his tiny trousers to find. It was my introduction to the difference between the sexes, the great engine that drives our small and weak species to keep on keepin’ on.Impelled by this same engine, I went back to that great den of bargains again and again in my high school years. It was there that my groom bought the suit  he wore on  our wedding day; there that that I bought the dress I wore that whole summer, a true flower- child frock which I loved with all my heart though it was so short I couldn’t sit down in it.Those were the days all right. Here’s a look-back. Watch it and weep.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joI288b2ByA&feature=related]

Beauty and the Beast?

Vogue Editor Anna Wintour, left, is the very picture of fashion, yet in the film about that magazine, The September Issue, the audience groans every time she extends a well-polished talon and slices into some poor designer. In the movie theatre I was in anyway they gave their hearts instead to her second-in-command  Grace Coddington who is the film's real beauty.Coddington was  breathtaking in her younger days, before her 20 years at American Vogue and her 20 years at British Vogue - during the 1960s in other words when she herself worked as fashion model – until a car accident so twisted her face that even now after many surgeries she has a sort sewn-together, around the left eye especially.Anyone can see that she makes no effort to follow in Anna’s footsteps in that she doesn’t seem to “try.” Tall as she is, and reasonably trim, she makes no effort at looking fashionable. Her hair is wild and she has no eyebrows. She wears no makeup, her clothes are baggy and her shoes look like Susan B. Anthony’s –  yet the audience loves her because she seems so kind, and real.Think what this may mean as you click on the trailer here and ask yourself: Are we choosing the inner kind of beauty over the outer kind at long last? Is that great baby Western culture finally learning to stand up in its playpen? Stay tuned!  And when you get the chance go see The September Issue at a theatre near you.This is Grace Coddington young: Grace today, all kindness and humor:

Sad Baby Monkeys

In my latest column I said that though the Olsen twins looked like sad baby monkeys when they were little, now they look like lemurs. Lemurs or meerkats. 'Course you have to be careful when you characterize people this way not just because it’s mean and you’re revealed as a jerk but because the fans of the made-fun-of will be all over you in a heartbeat.For example a long time ago I was writing about Elizabeth Taylor and had the nerve to say that at least ONE of her chins was still pointy and instantly here came a letter by an outraged lady sent in to me from one of the papers where my column appears.“Where do YOU get off?" she wanted to know. "I see your picture. Your eyes are squinty, your hair is out of style and your teeth look false!” I liked that quote so much I put it on the cover of my first book.But hey, you know what, at least in my picture I’m smiling – AND I have normal amount of body fat. Look at this waif from the same issue of the magazine that has Meerkat Ashley on the cover. Plus is it just me or does she look just a little simple-minded ?

Topless!

Coupla days ago someone left a giant Homer Simpson doll on my steps with an anonymous note reading “Has anyone seen my underwear?” I guess because when not going on and on about Ted Kennedy here last week I also wrote about how I had to cheat and lie my way back into Weight Watcher’s because I was starting to look like Simpson in my underpants.

This week my column is on Fall Fashions and Shopping and all, a rich vein for satire if ever there was one and between the  fun I had researching that and playing with my new doll I got the idea to dig out the ugliest pair of panties I own Victoria Secret or not, and put them on old Homer. Then too the guy at the hardware store and I were talking bras the other day and he asked me what they cost. “I grit my teeth and lay down 80 bucks a pop, “ I told him. “If you need a bra you need a good bra."Now I don’t know if you’d say Homer needs a BRA exactly... Anyway here he is, my alter ego pal a few hours ago, braless still but otherwise armed with his Vicki-Secret bikinis and ready take on the day!