Not Ready for My Close-Up

So now it’s almost time for my author photo. You know, the image that will be emblazoned on the book cover of Bad Romance, used in publicity materials, slapped on souvenir mugs, and maybe even silkscreened onto a T-shirt. I tried a couple of selfies. They were pretty dreadful. Then I enlisted my professional photographer friend Paul and told him the look I was aiming for: somewhere between Nicole Kidman and Margaret Atwood. He showed me a few shots that seemed okay and then tinkered with a final version. I was frankly aghast when I opened it: That could not be me with the scraggly neck and quilted undereye bags and deep grooves in the forehead. No, that couldn’t be me….that couldn’t be me because it was my mother!

Now, I’ve been seeing Mom pop up in the mirror for ages, at least as early as forty or so when it seemed I was growing into my “mature” face and we both had pretty good bones to carry us through. But I never dreamed I’d get geriatric Mom (probably because I believed that I’d never grow old, a common denial among my generation).

Most people I know dread turning into their parents, and yet it happens, and in many ways it seems inevitable: They are our first role models, after all, and then there is the matter of those genes….

I spent a lot of time with my parents as they aged, flying frequently from New York to Florida to check up on their health and well-being (my brother could not be bothered until my dad’s dementia threatened his inheritance). So I kept tabs on their decline and made mental notes about the things I did not want to have happen to me.

In their prime, my mom and dad were Manhattan sophisticates whom I’ve written about before in an earlier Substack, “Eat My Memoir.” They were not wealthy, but in their New York days, roughly 1963-1986, they had sufficient income to afford the niceties of urban living: good restaurants, avant-garde films, the theater now and then. After they moved to Florida, their joie de vivre tanked (neither gave much of a damn about golf, the most readily available entertainment). And as they grew older, I watched with alarm the changes in their appearance and lifestyle, vowing never to go there if I could help it. Here are the things I think I need to guard against:

Watching Really Stupid Stuff on the Screen: In their case, it was television, and I found it a little distressing that they opted for cornball shows like All in the Family and The Golden Girls, but they were too early for Netflix or Prime Video and so I concede they had not much choice. They were also fans of the weather channel, which seems an especially big past-time in Florida. My mother, who bequeathed me her smart mouth, referred to the state as the “gangrenous penis” because it was always colored green on the weather maps.

Yes, I plead guilty to too much screen time from streaming services. I think my tastes are better, trending toward the zillion Austen remakes (yet shunning Bridgerton because it’s too packaged), but I have been known to succumb to Emily in Paris and Project Runway. As the body grows soft, so goes the brain.

Not Giving a Damn About What You Wear: In her prime, during her twenty years as a librarian at the elite Buckley School in Manhattan (graduates include several Rockefellers, John Lindsay, and Cyrus Vance), my mother shopped at designer consignment stores and cut a pretty smart figure at school gatherings among the Upper East Side mommies.

My dad, a senior-level executive for a company that sold air compressors, always wore a suit to the office and projected a certain Don Draper cool, avant la lettre.

In retirement, to my dismay, all sense of style went out the window and it pained me to see my mother in capri pants and cheesy polyester blouses from JC Penney. My dad, in his final years, took to wearing farm-boy suspenders and the same Madras jacket day after day (and it’s not like money was really an issue—they had generous pensions and Social Security).

I worry that I’m increasingly less interested in what I slap on my carcass, but it hasn’t quite reached the tipping point of neglecting to change my underwear or wearing flipflops 24/7. I throw open the doors to my closets and know I should start weeding out some of this stuff, but it will really really hurt: There is the elegant Calvin Klein blouse I wore to the Gerhard Richter opening at MoMA, the Natori robe and nightie my ex bought me for my 40^th birthday, all those skirts and jackets and dresses I wore to press conferences in New York and to the gallery for three years—it’s like my whole life history is there in clothes. Too hard to deal with right now. How did I forget to have a daughter?

Not Caring Much About Food Either: My mother was always a fairly indifferent cook—cream of mushroom soup and French’s crispy fried onions were among her best friends—but she did have a few inspired dishes, like chicken divan and Roman veal stew. Once they moved to Florida, my parents seemed to gradually lose all interest in appetizing meals and Stouffer’s ruled the freezer. I would cook up a storm when I visited—risotto Milanese, roast chicken with vegetables, Scotch broth—but I knew as soon as I left they would go back to their old bad ways. Saddest of all were the early-bird dinners at Denny’s.

I am not too worried about this. If there is one thing that gets me out of bed in the morning it is the prospect of trying a new recipe. Tonight I’m making hari chutney spaghetti from The New York Times. I always have great leftovers!

So, yes, in some respects I am slipping into the ways of my elders. Still, I have yet to let my toenails go all to hell. I’m keeping an eye on them. And on those annoying little chin whiskers.

But to get back to that problem of the pesky author photo. In the course of an email exchange with biographer Mary Gabriel (Madonna and Ninth Street Woman, among others), I vented my dismay at using one of my recent multi-chinned selfies or the warts-and-all portrait from my “professional” photographer friend. She said not to worry about it. She was still using a shot from 2010 for publicity. “When you look at author photos, they’re all from when the writer was younger,” she advised. “So find a photo you really like of yourself and use that.”

And that’s what I’m doing, dear reader. This is from about six years ago, when my hair was longer and lighter and my face still had that freshly ironed look, but it’s one of my faves and so I shall use it henceforth. If you meet me in person, just lie and say, “Oh, you look so much better with shorter hair!”

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P.S. My apologies for the alarm I caused last week with reports of a suspicious ticker. It was scary but not life-threatening and I should have kept it to myself. My GP suspected it was an overexerted muscle, possibly from lifting weights. I’ll try not to do that again.