Joan Rivers, the amazing and ever-funny comedienne made an eclectic and provocative appearance on the new Tonight Show; the same Tonight Show she used to host when Johnny Carson was still alive. She showed a picture of herself with Johnny: she was stunning. Now her face surreally resembles The Joker on an episode of Batman. She has been botoxed, pulled, and sown into a caricature of her former self. Why? While at the hairdresser I read an article on movie stars who have been “plastic surgeoned” to the point of bizarre and yes: ugliness. Again, why? Meg Ryan was beautiful and sweet, now she looks like someone hit her in the face with a baseball bat. What is more incredible the article noted, was the fact that some of these stars have gone from big screen draws to anonymity because of their “improved” looks. They lost the look that launched them to fame and they lost the scripts that went with it. Albeit the fact that both male and female stars have been sown into quilts, the number of females seems to outweigh the number of males. Again, why?

The double standard lies in society’s expectations of health and viability. Meaning: the younger a woman looks, the healthier and more active she is perceived to be. Getting the dream job, the best script, the youngest boyfriend is all about being young. In one of my favorite movies The First Wives Club, Goldie Hawn as the sexy 40ish movie star Elise, goes to her plastic surgeon for another lip lift. The plastic surgeon played by pan faced Rob Reiner, tries to talk her out it by telling her that at her age she looks terrific. She balks at him and says that in Hollywood there where only three ages for women: “babe, district attorney, or driving Miss Daisy.” How true is that? I think that Goldie Hawn struck a relevant note. To solidify that argument: in the same article about movies stars and enhancements, Jamie Lee Curtis told reporters that when she made the decision to allow her hair to turn gray and age “gracefully,” her Hollywood friends told her that she had just signed her death warrant as an actress. However, she maintains that she has remained popular and played a recurring role on the hit series NCIS; looking great and gray at 50+. Of course she now plays parts of “her age!”

Why the fear of rejection because we opt to let our looks grow with our age? The world has set separate standards for men and women. When a man’s hair turns gray he is “distinguished” or “handsomely middle-aged:” have you checked out George Clooney lately? His hair is grayer than my mother’s and she is 97. But he still draws the younger crowd into swooning. Now let’s turn the table 180% toward the woman: gray? “She is letting herself go; she is beginning to look her age.” Well, shut the front door and call me stupid, but aren’t we supposed to look our age? And what is wrong in looking our age? Now watch a paunchy gray-haired middle-aged dude strut with a woman young enough to be his daughter: the reaction is envy and a pat on the back for being such a sport. Check out a woman with a younger man: the reaction is generally border-line incredulity “Tut, tut, tut, he is young enough to be her son!” I once heard a joke about Sophie Tucker, an amazing provocative vaudeville entertainer of the early 20^th century. She was healthy looking and funny. It seems (or so the story goes) that Sophie had a friend called Ernie, and both Sophie and Ernie were in their 80’s. One day Ernie told Sophie that he “got himself a 20-year old: how about that?” Sophie replied to Ernie that she got herself a 20-year old as well, but she reminded him “that 20 goes into 80 a helluva lot more than 80 goes into 20!”

The point is that we all grow older and old. Why are women under so much more scrutiny than men? Why are women more insecure when it comes to age than men? When a man reaches a certain age he seems to come to terms with the fact that he is losing his hair, losing his bowels, and gaining a gut. But society does not expect anything else from him. A woman still goes to the hairdresser kidding herself and the world that at 60 she has no gray hair. “It’s my natural color!” A woman spends a fortune putting creams on her face in the event that the wrinkles disappear overnight, the chin lifts like Cher’s, and the skin remains radiant. But is it our fault? We are fed visions of perfect bodies and ageless people on the covers of magazines in every grocery check-out counter. Have you counted how many men grace the covers of these magazines? I have. Two magazines: NRA and NASCAR. Women rule in the world of beauty, air brushing, diet, health, youth, and everything else that is expected of us to line the coffers of a multi-billion dollar beauty and entertainment industry. Has anyone ever seen a magazine on middle-aged women or for women over 60? To remain ageless in a generation where reality shows are as unreal as honesty in Washington, and social media is the oracle to every truth, is not only difficult but as impossible as chewing on water.

Aging is not a disease but a unique process that enables us to morph from ourselves to ourselves. We have the unique opportunity to change with time and gather more wisdom and experience. Instead we are asked to remain in the mindset of an imbecile adolescent because: I don’t know, do you? Why do we allow it? My 97 year-old mother is an amazing woman. She married young and raised seven children before, during, and after World War II. Estee Lauder hardly made an appearance in our house, and I do not remember my mother ever going to have her nails “done.” Today she barely has wrinkles on her face, and her skin is soft and beautiful. Despite her arthritic hands, her nails have a natural shine and polish to them. She claims that she owes her skin softness to the fact that she never indulged in sun worshiping or smoking. Her hair is a silver gray with a few dark patches, but full and curly. She never used any colorants in her hair, and as she aged her beauty within seemed to ooze without. I only hope to look half as good as she does when I reach 97, but right now I need all the help I can get. So pass on the Guerlain wrinkle firmer because I just noticed a new wrinkle under my right eye!

A few days ago a mother and a cute baby walked into the lobby where I work. The baby could not have been more than a few months old: still innocent, still smelling good, still vulnerable and attracting attention. My employees ooohed and aaaahed at the little rascal each outdoing the other to get a smile from the chubby face. Then out of the blue one of the ladies asked me: “Do you remember your kids this little.” It was a pie in the face moment because if truth be told; I did not. Now when I think of my children, I think of them as adults. I really have to put an effort on my gray cells to think back because it seems like only yesterday that they went from drooling diaper ridden urchins to two wonderful adults. Where did the time go, and how did I miss it?

“Time flies by so fast” I suppose some moronic sage said that and the world took on the mantra. But seriously: does time’s velocity have any correlation to our age? The older we get the faster time goes by? A few years ago I heard some old self-proclaimed “doctor” on one of these psychoanalytic reality day-time show say that the reason time seems to go faster as we grow older was because based on a person living 100 years, a person at a younger age has longer to wait before reaching a hundred than say a person turning 70. He was equating our age to a clock: the closer we get to midnight the faster time seems to be going than at one in the morning. As goofy as it seems, he might have caught on to something.

I remember how as a kid I wished that time would go faster especially in the spring in anticipation of summer, and in the fall in anticipation of Christmas. As kids we never seemed to have time to accomplish anything: anything we wanted to anyway. When pregnant I wanted time to fly because during the last trimester I found myself becoming an animal lover; empathizing with elephants whose gestation period is in double digits. I bet time crawled for them as well. I wonder how the male elephant fared under those circumstances, living with a female gestating for all those months in hormone turmoil. I digress and pity the tusked fool. You get the picture. I do not think that time goes by faster as we grow older; I think we grow slower in relation to time. What used to take a few minutes to accomplish when young, later in life it takes a millennium. Have you ever walked behind two old ladies carrying groceries?

My father must have been the exception because he literally did not have time for the mundane which meant that he did not have time for half of humanity. His attention span went from hundred to zero in micro-seconds much like the way he drove his car only in reverse. He had a leaded foot on the road and did not like pedestrians because they were on “his road and right of way” and as a pedestrian did not like drivers who refused to stop for pedestrians because they were on “his road and right of way.” Catch my drift? For my dad and until the day he passed I doubt that he or time ever slowed down. Putting kids, gestation, old ladies, and my dad into an Einstein-like equation, I concluded that there was only one viable explanation on time.

Time stands still for those of us who as we grow older are molded into thinking that we should slow down. “Take it easy, you are not as young as you used to be!” Familiar? Why do we have to be reminded about how old we are getting or how old we are? Don’t these people know that we DO KNOW how old we are getting and we definitely KNOW how old we are, some of us just want to ignore it. Humor us for God’s sake! We are not asking for much, perhaps we want to have the choice to take our time. There is a difference between growing older and getting old. Cher grew older but never got old…of course she had help from her own Botox god but that is another story for another day. Society sends us mixed messages: those over 60 are now the “new 40” which deflates all ages following. So why are we still harping on acting and dressing “our” age when youth and energy are glorified and worshiped like an Aztec god in Peru? Nobody questions Madonna’s age!

Last week I watched an amazing 80 year-old dancing with her 38 year-old Spanish dance instructor on a talent show. As they transcended from a slow almost clumsy waltz to a heavy salsa, the once pitying looks on the audience changed to incredulity and awe. Age did not matter as those 80 year-old light tight feet and thighs seemed to lift themselves off the floor in rhythmic moves and glides that secretly urged us to look for hidden wires that must be pulling that little old lady across the stage like Peter Pan. Surely no octogenarian can do that? Well, she did! She had been dancing since she was five years old! Go figure, time is surely not flying by for her (excuse the pun). Even stoic Simon Powell had to admit that the lady was amazing, and that her extraordinary dancing had nothing to do with her age: she was a good dancer.

My 97 year-old mother sits in the lounge every morning wishing that another day would pass quickly and bring her closer to being with my father: wherever my father passed to. Being in a seniors’ home contemplating how to pass eight hours of every day must be tedious to anyone, let alone a 97 year-old. To her, time is crawling by and if she could move the earth faster around the sun, she would. She is not tired because she is 97; she is tired because she knows that she has nothing else to contribute. That is the reason why time flies for some while for others: it crawls. When my mom was a “mom” she complained that there weren’t enough hours in the day to do everything. Now she complains that the day is too long and so are the hours. Does time really flies by? I don’t think so. I think it simply adapts to us.