New wrinkle to art of aging
I love going on the internet to look through those clickbait photo galleries that prove people were just as crazy 50 years ago as they are today. (Well, maybe not quite as crazy.)
There are slide shows like “The funniest wedding pictures ever” and “The truth about Viking women” and “Shocking historical photos you don’t see in history books,” which include Patrick Swayze dressed in drag, Alice Cooper with a snake coiled around his neck, and nerdy Bill Gates sitting on the banana seat of his wheelie bicycle.
My favorites, however, are those then-and-now photos of celebrities that show what they looked like in the past and — gasp — what they look like in the present. Don’t believe everything you see at the Oscars. Heck, don’t believe anything.
In a few decades, you can put on a lot of wrinkles. Just ask Madonna, Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger and Arnold Schwarzenegger, not to mention rock stars such as Steven Tyler and Keith Richards.
Some celebrities have had so much plastic surgery they look like aliens. Of course, plastic surgery doesn’t hide the problem as well as Photoshop does. After seeing their pictures, you won’t be envious of the rich and famous, and you’ll learn to love your wrinkles.
As actor Gloria Swanson, who played the overthe-hill movie star Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” said, “The stars are ageless, aren’t they?” They want to be, but whether they are is another question entirely.
The truth is stars are made of the same stuff as the rest of us, though many of them don’t age well because of their selfindulgent lifestyles.
Once upon a time, they were all dolled up for their closeups, but when you see them without makeup, they’re frumpy and wasted and worn, skulking around the streets of New York and Los Angeles so that paparazzi won’t capture them with a telephoto lens and publish tabloid photos of them wearing pajamas, cuddling their chihuahuas and sipping Starbucks.
Yes, they get old like the rest of humanity, but aging is a pill they can’t swallow because — to quote Norma Desmond again — “Great stars have great pride.”
She should have listened to her boy toy, played by William Holden, who told her, “There’s nothing tragic about being 50 unless you want to be 25.”
I don’t take delight in the misery and mortality of aging celebrities, so before you start ranting at me for being cruel and heartless and cynical, let me confess that I share their pain. I don’t even resemble the picture in my high school yearbook. In fact, no one believes we’re related when they see it.
But as they say in 12 Step programs, you are not alone. Every so often, my wife comes home from the supermarket after spotting one of the cheerleaders from her high school, who was in with the “in crowd,” as we said back in the olden days, and she can’t wait to tell me the shocking news: “Boy, she got old!”
That could be our collective epitaph: “Boy, she got old … he got old … we’re all getting old.” I calculate we start to age 25 minutes after we’re born, and the process accelerates in adolescence and from 40 to 65, at which point it begins to turbo-charge.
I got a recent reminder of my mortality on Ash Wednesday when the priest put his thumb in the ashes and marked my forehead with a black smudge and said, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”
That truth applies to everyone from Donald Trump to Joe Biden, from the Kardashian klan to the Obamas, from Washington, D.C., and Hollywood to White River Junction and Palm Springs.
If you’ve ever wandered through an old graveyard, you probably stumbled upon one of those early New England tombstones, with a skull and crossbones etched in the sandstone, accompanied by the uplifting epitaph: “Remember me as you pass by. As you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so you must be. Therefore prepare to follow me.”
On that happy note, I leave you with the timeless wisdom of the great Roman orator, statesman and self-help guru Marcus Tullius Cicero, who wrote the book “On Aging” when he was a mere 62 years old.
“The young man (and woman) hopes that he will live for a long time, and this hope the old man cannot have,” Cicero said. “Yet he is in a better situation than the young man, since what the latter merely hopes for, the former has already attained. The one wishes to live long, the other has lived long.”
Cicero even had something to say to celebrities such as Madonna and Mick Jagger: “An intemperate, disorderly youth will bring to old age, a feeble and worn-out body.”
However, he concluded with this optimistic sentiment: “Old age is really not so bad. May you come to know the condition.”
Unfortunately, he never got to fully know the condition because he was executed by Mark Antony’s thugs a year after he wrote those words.
I calculate we start to age 25 minutes after we’re born, and the process accelerates in adolescence and from 40 to 65, at which point it begins to turbo-charge.