From the Editor
wEWERE EARLY to the party. When Zoomer began extolling the virtues, wisdoms and pleasures of positive aging in 2008, there was doubt and even ridicule that anyone – man or woman – would embrace such a thing as getting older.
Take the 10-year – make it 11, actually – challenge, and you can see that older people – in particular, older women – are having a moment.
In the United States, we have the grit and grace of Nancy Pelosi, once again Speaker of the House of Congress at 78. Before her re-election to the role she held during the Bush (43) and Obama administrations – she served “merely” as Democratic leader of the house when the Republicans were in power – political pundits and members of her own caucus had dismissed her as “old” and, therefore, “out of touch.” She showed them by leading the party to a historic victory in the 2018 mid-terms. Shortly after, she assured that she would have enough votes to once again wield the gavel, when in an Oval Office moment broadcast on live television, she faced down President Trump. After challenging him to have “evidence-based conversations,” she delivered the coup de grâce – “Mr. President, please don’t characterize the strength that I bring.”
Pelosi then walked out to the scrum wearing sunglasses and a funnel-necked armour-like coat, cheery colour notwithstanding, over which the internet exploded and a million memes were born. The moment inspired an Instagram account, @excellentcoatsonirritatedwomen, which, for the record, demonstrates that you can look good while engaging in badassery – my terminology.
After seven Academy Award nominations, this may just be the year that Glenn Close, 71, finally gets to take home a little gold man for her performance in The Wife in which she plays a beleaguered helpmate to a “great” man who subsumed her own desires and ambitions to his. Close, who is 33 years older than the next oldest person in her category, has already won the Critics Choice Award (in a tie with Lady Gaga for A Star Is Born), the Screen Actors Guild Award and the Golden Globe. She spoke of her mother and grandmother during that acceptance speech, of their lifetimes of sacrifices trapped in eras that offered them no opportunities.
Olivia Novak, the toughas-nails lawyer on the 1980s Canadian television series Street Legal was certainly one woman who ensured she grabbed every opportunity she saw – as does the woman who plays her, Cynthia Dale (“Prime Time,” page 33). The baby of the bunch at 58, Dale returns to the role in the Street Legal reboot 25 years after it went off the air. Olivia is in a battle to save her career and is forced to work with scrappy youngsters. God help any of them who would dare to mischaracterize the strength that she brings. Let’s make that a mantra.