I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50

by Gurwitch, Annabelle

  “But he casts me a lot. He likes to see my face.”

  Uh-oh. This makes all of us worried. There are a lot of us villagers. It also hits me that the women villagers basically fit into two categories: maidens and crones. There is nothing in between. In fact, as the median life span of a female serf during the Middle Ages was forty-three, I am actually too old for this job, and I feel very grateful indeed to be here.

  At least in a modern setting an actress can hope for age-appropriate roles spanning from girls (with variations on a scale of sluttiness) to mother, MILF, professional, cougar, and then death. If you age with enough gravitas and can carry off serious eyewear, you might fit in a role as a society doyenne or judge somewhere between cougar and death, but like most professions in America, show business has become an all-or-nothing business. Many roles that might have gone to someone like me are regularly offered to and accepted by current and former stars.

  Yet there are always a slew of supporting roles for men of a certain age. These craggy gentlemen play anonymous communicators of exposition, relaying forgettable lines of dialogue like Sir, you’re needed in the war room, or sit stony-faced through tension-filled scenes portraying senior members of the armed forces. With the ban on women serving in armed combat now lifted, an unintended positive consequence will be that future generations of actresses should see more unremarkable but remunerative employment opportunities. Perhaps the real sign that women have found equal footing in the world will be when we get to see a collection of scowling female Army generals leaning in around a conference table in Iron Man 7.

  By two a.m., we four female villagers have bonded. It’s so late there’s simply no doing anything productive with our time, like reading or studying for a real estate license, so we’re talking to stay awake. Face tells us about her Brigitte Bardot tribute band, her first marriage and how she hopes to have children within the next two years; she’s thirty-six, after all. We promise to come and see her perform and even though my son sent me a text earlier in the day putting me on notice that “we don’t know each other in cyberspace,” I tell her it’s worth it to have kids. She should try to get pregnant soon—tonight, if possible. Another actress works in historic preservation and has just been offered an administrative position at a prestigious university in Richmond, Virginia. I look at her dirt-smeared face peering out from under a dull gray wool snood. “You have to take that job,” I say. “You have to get out of this town—tonight, if possible,” I implore her with an urgency that suggests she’s plotting a prison break and I’m going to help her dig the tunnel with spoons. We’re each listing our favorite meals like we’re kids at summer camp or cellmates on death row. On a typical shoot, you will be given a heads-up on when you’ll be needed so you can gauge your energy, but we’re in an information void. Every hour or so, we check in with one of the assistant directors, who just shrugs dismissively. We trudge back to our new digs, the background tent. We principals are the only ones there; the extras are all on the set. We’re starting to lose our connection to the production. We’re adrift, grazing at the craft services table on salty chips and nuts out of boredom. One of the villagers begins sipping liquid from a flask he’s hidden in his gunnysack, and that’s the last we see of him for the rest of the night.

  “Screw it,” Napoleon Dynamite’s grandmother announces. “I’m not gonna force my way into a shot.” Snatching the wimple off her head, she heads into one of the compartments to sleep the whole thing off.

  By four a.m., our newly appointed chair of the historic preservation department (she emailed her acceptance at three a.m.) is fast asleep, and the remaining male villagers are napping as well. There’s only one hour left before sunrise, and French Face and I are the only ones still motivated enough by the prospect of residuals and insurance benefits to keep our eyes open, but even we are fading. I decide it’s time to take things into our own hands. I grab my new BFF, Best French Face, and rouse us into action.

  “I’m not going to let you miss out on being in another one of this director’s commercials. I made an effort to look this terrible. Let’s not let this night go to waste.”

  Cloaked in our blankets, we head out to find the production. The bright klieg lights have moved farther up the street. The set decorators are dressing a town square with fresh bales of hay.

  My BFF and I casually drift closer to the video village. I sidle up to a portable heater that’s been placed next to the director and pretend to warm my hands, even though it’s really my wet feet that are freezing. At the same time, I drop my blanket so the director doesn’t forget that I am actually an actor and not one of the dozens of crew people. A crew person in a wimple would be unusual, but I can’t take the chance; the clock is ticking. No one bothers to go down to rouse the four other villagers; they will sleep through this last setup, but my BFF and I are in.

  We are standing in the town square, our arms laden with baskets of bread, when the giant troll bursts through a wall, bricks tumble down and we run for our lives. My heart is pounding, my eyes dart back and forth, searching for a safe route as I hurry to escape being crushed by that troll. As I sprint, my velvet bodice bursts open. I’ve snacked on too much salty craft service, but covered as it is with the tunic and shawl, no one notices or cares. Besides, I am merely a tiny bundle of faded fabrics moving across the frame. The sun begins to rise in the distance and I hear the director call, “Cut. It’s a wrap.”

  The air is clear as I drive home. I’ve survived the night without my head catching on fire. By the time I arrive home it doesn’t matter what I do for a living, I’m just happy to have a warm shower. I fall asleep dreaming about the dough I will make when the commercial runs. Dan told me the spot cost millions of dollars. Surely they will run it night and day.

  Six months later, the commercial hasn’t aired and I receive an update from Dan. The technology this spot is touting turns out not to work. The company has spent millions of dollars filming a commercial for something that’s a dud. The agency has determined that hazard pay will not be forthcoming. I will not maraud on national television. It’s disappointing enough to make me want to run through the streets with a lit torch. Of course, that’s something I might have been able to get away with when I was younger, but at this age I can only do that if a camera is rolling.

  AT LEAST I MADE AN EFFORT

  Dear God,

  Is it a sin for an atheist to post on both JDate and ChristianMingle?

  “Love. It’s the final frontier,” the Love Coach declares during our phone call.

  “Well, you’re the expert,” I tell her, “but I thought space was the final frontier.”

  “Nope, it’s love. Women have forgotten how to be feminine. We’ve lost touch with our sensuality.”

  I’m interviewing the Love Coach, a professional in the lucrative field of romance, for a women’s magazine, but I am suspicious of her enterprise. We take for granted that there have long been baseball and football coaches, but now there are all manner of specialized “experts” who regularly award themselves honorary degrees. I’ve earned a doctorate in life! appears on numerous websites I visit while researching the story.

  She tells me that her work is “on the cutting edge of feminism.” I live at the intersection of feminism and Feministing, so I take a claim like that seriously. Are we talking first-, second-, third- or fourth-wave feminism? I wonder. As I understand it, the first wave gave us the vote, while the second freed us from our kitchens and bras. Postfeminism promised we could have it all. The third wave made sexy bras safe for grrls as long as we’re wearing them for our own enjoyment, and the fourth wave promises we can blog about it all. I was raised with second-wave values in a postfeminist world and now find myself surrounded by third- and fourth-wavers. I am easily identifiable as the oldest of the women I share an office with. I’m the only one without tattoos, ironic eyeliner, fluid sexual preferences and a Pinterest account.*

  “Do wom
en really need to pay someone to help us with our love lives? Don’t we seek out our girlfriends for help?” I ask her.

  “I give them a totally objective eye.”

  She might have a point there. No matter how close you are, there is an unspoken line you cannot cross with even your closest girlfriends. Saying something negative about someone a friend is dating, considering dating or married to, if they’re not already halfway through divorce proceedings, can be a friendship ender. Also, they don’t listen. “Do you think that Jamie might be gay?” every single one of my friends had suggested to me during the six months he and I dated. Nothing—not his gender-neutral name, his lilting voice, sex that I could only describe as All That Pounding, nor the dresses and wigs in his closet—could convince me. “Some people take Halloween very seriously.” I shrugged. It wasn’t until he broke up with me to date someone named Todd that I conceded they might have a point.

  “You need to stay current with online dating etiquette,” she tells me. “I continually do research, and that’s one of the things we’ll focus on in this weekend’s Magical Mani-festing Makeover. See you bright and early tomorrow.”

  Magical Mani-festing Makeover. It’s hard to imagine how this workshop will have anything to do with the cutting edge of anything other than the razor I’ll want to slit my wrists with. I’m not sure which of those words is most frightening to me, or if it’s the combination of the three, even though I have heard about the inexplicable vagaries of online dating from my girlfriends who are in their forties or fifties and newcomers to it. My fifty-one-year-old friend Denise was just matched with two people by one of the most popular fee-based sites: her brother and a homeless guy who goes by the name Bling-Bling.

  Seven of the Love Coach’s clients are flying in for this workshop and are scheduled for a wardrobe revamp with a professional stylist in the morning. As part of my assignment, I will observe their shopping expedition. Who knows? Maybe these women suffer from some terrible afflictions that they need ministering to: clubfoot, harelip, hirsutism?

  The next day, I am the first of our group to arrive at a local boutique.

  I have planted myself on a low velvet settee when the manager of the store greets me. She looks to be about my age but has been improbably squeezed into skin-hugging jeans and a low-cut denim bustier mostly untied with leather lacing. It’s more sausage casing than clothing. The glare from her lip gloss is blinding. “You want things that have some va-va-voom, right?” She thinks I am part of the Love Coach’s team and I’m not sure if LC’s told anyone I am a writer or I’m supposed to be her assistant. I don’t want to blow my cover, so I say, “Sure,” and head to the racks of clothing.

  The dresses look like bedazzled napkins. I unearth a few items that I might consider wearing, like a tailored white shirt and slim black pants, when the Love Coach wafts in decked out in towering stilettos and a slinky aubergine sheath. She’s wearing a scent she’s created called Vulvacious. It has a lingering sweet smell that clings to the air around her. It’s a Proustian combination of bubble gum and vagina. She’s accompanied by someone I intuit to be her stylist. He’s emaciated, wearing a pinstriped suit with a vest and is carrying the Love Coach’s Shih Tzu. He takes one look at my selections: “These ladies are going on dates, they’re not preparing tax returns,” and begins pulling out sheer halter tops and shiny spandex jeans, a look I’ll call “stripper casual.” Is this what women are supposed to wear for a date? Is this what I should be wearing on dates with my husband? I actually can’t remember the last time my husband and I went on a date, but I am absolutely certain I didn’t make this kind of effort to look sexy. I’m not sure I ever have in my entire life, but then I haven’t been single in almost two decades.

  I want to be helpful, so I grab everything I can find with a plunging neckline. As if on cue, the clients arrive and it’s far, far worse than I anticipated. The women are uniformly friendly, attractive and intelligent. They’ve flown in from across the globe, including locations as diverse as Morocco, Detroit, Texas, Virginia and Saskatchewan. They are all approximately my age. I would have felt so much better about this makeover if just one of them had at least a social anxiety disorder, if not leprosy. I zip and unzip them and suggest accessories. I pull the stylist aside. “Do they need to look so . . . tarty?” He looks at me like I’ve suggested that these ladies enlist in the North Korean People’s Army. “People like to get dressed up on dates,” he says flatly, adding, “many of us get stuck with a look left over from the last time we felt really attractive, which might have been when we were in high school.” I nod and try to move away without him noticing the scrunchy that’s anchoring my ponytail.

  The stylist and LC insist on higher heels, more cleavage and more color. More pink! I was never a girly girl. I never wanted to ride a pony or be a princess. I’ve always been pink-averse and ever since Victoria’s Secret began targeting teenage girls with their Love Pink campaign, I’ve found the shade particularly loathsome.* Nevertheless, LC insists on pinks of all configurations: Tufted pink. Ruffled pink. Ruched pink. I feel like I am from an entirely different species from another planet. Homo crone from Planet Dowdy.

  Armed with their new dating wardrobes, the clients, LC and I caravan to a hotel for the next phase of the makeover. It’s a swanky place where electronic dance music pulses in the lobby twenty-four hours a day. Strolling through the lobby I notice the restaurant has morphed into the kind of date-night eatery where you can expect to be served a selection of spicy olives as an entrée. Many years ago, when it was a midpriced establishment, my husband treated us to dinner and an anniversary overnight stay there. The median age in the hotel now appears to be between twenty-five and twenty-five and a half. I hurry into an elevator to avoid being carded. There might actually be an age maximum.

  At the rooftop pool area, I can’t help but feel like I’m watching meat being carefully packaged as the Love Coach oversees a team that includes a hair and makeup artist and a photographer who snaps candid shots for use on dating sites. Is this cheating? Or is the privilege/punishment of age having the good sense to make sure that you present yourself in the best light possible?

  LC catches my eye and pulls me aside. She shows me her clients’ “before” photos. There is a preponderance of poufy hair, some unflattering angles and attempts to convey uniqueness that are somehow getting lost in translation. One gal, a nurse practitioner from Texas with symmetrical features, has placed herself behind a sheer curtain of fabric. The image was probably meant to foster an air of mystery; instead, it sends one of two confusing messages: I have terrible skin and must not be seen with the naked eye, or I long to be recruited into a Saudi Arabian harem. Another client appears to be in her kitchen, preparing a meal with an adult son. Here the intent must have been I’m a nurturing person, but the photo screams We’re a package deal. LC’s marketing background is brought home when she points out that most women are dressed in black, while research shows that bright color can positively influence purchasing outcomes, and though I am hesitant to compare this process to purchasing, when I view one “after” photograph, I can see that a hot pink cami really does make you stand out.

  Why should I be surprised that people want to game the system? At this very moment, or at any moment, there is a picture of me on my social media feeds that I have taken on a day when I’ve had my makeup done professionally, rushed home and, before I’ve scrubbed my face of the multiple layers of flattering war paint, posed in front of my computer camera a minimum of twenty times before picking the shot that I think looks most uncontrived. Even so, I am finding it impossible to look good in a photograph at this age.

  All the tricks I honed as an actress don’t work anymore. I used to narrow my glance just slightly in what I considered my come-hither look, but I have so little eye left that I just look like I’ve misplaced one of my several pairs of reading glasses. My lips slightly parted once conveyed a certain wantonness; now it just makes me lo
ok parched. A closed, pursed mouth betrayed a touch of defiant insouciance, but now that expression settles into scowling resignation. Can’t look down, ever. Too jowly. You must always be smiling in photos when you’re fifty, otherwise you look disgruntled, but don’t smile too much—too many wrinkles.

  I thought I’d perfected at least one potentially flattering look—gleeful surprise. This astonishment must be judiciously deployed, as when you’re checking out in the grocery line, going through security at an airport, or delivering meals to a sick friend, as it can be puzzling if not traumatizing for others to be subjected to this look. On a positive note, while volunteering at my son’s school I have received tutorials from well-meaning committee mothers on everything from how to write a letter and how to check names off a list to how to use double-stick tape, all of which are perfectly appropriate occasions for the astonished look. Poolside with the Love Coach, however, the lighting is so superior, these ladies can’t help but look astonishingly gorgeous.

  After the photos are all taken, we gather in a suite. Chairs have been positioned in a circle and journals embossed with the words “Love Notes” have been provided for us.

  “Put some tissues out,” LC whispers to me. “Someone always cries.

  “I want you to write down your favorite weather, colors, objects, flower, material, or magical creature,” she instructs the group. “These ‘essence words’ will become user names for your online dating. They will announce to the world who you are so you can attract your perfect mate.” She instructs me to do the exercise as an experiment.