Michelle Obama’s Arms

Michelle Obama- ten feet away from me!

With all the unpleasant things going on this week, I haven’t had a chance to write about my UNBELIEVABLE EXPERIENCE on Monday. I was Monica Holloway’s guest (thank you Areva Martin, CEO of Special Needs Network) at a fundraising luncheon for Obama 2012, featuring keynote speaker: Michelle Obama! Yes, folks. On Monday I was just ten feet away from greatness, and GREAT ARMS. Holy moly, those arms… I am not kidding.

As Michelle walked out, gorgeous and poised, the Inner City Kids Orchestra started to play, and Monica and I looked at each other with tears in our eyes. It was truly a surreal and magic moment, and suddenly all the things Monica and I had stressed about up until that moment were forgotten.

What did we stress about, you ask? How ‘bout this: WHAT DO YOU WEAR WHEN YOU ARE GOING TO SEE THE FIRST LADY OF THE MOST POWERFUL COUNTRY IN THE WORLD? I mean, really. Monica and I were on the phone until well past midnight the night before (and we had to be on the road by 8:30 in the morning) talking each other off the ledge. We both tore through our closets, describing in detail each garment we owned, while simultaneously looking at pictures of each other on facebook.

“Oh, how about the dress you’re wearing here at this gig in 2009, Hollye? That looks cute.”

“I can’t wear that! It’s sleeveless! I can’t bare my arms around HER! And anyway I got that dress at Ross…EVERYONE WILL KNOW!”

“Google Michelle Obama right now- there’s a picture of her in a GAP dress- I swear!”

And this is how the conversation went until we exhausted ourselves, nearing 1a.m., neither of us closer to a decision.

At 7 a.m. I decided to wear a blazer and dress pants with a nice blouse. It had been probably ten years since I had worn these “corporate” clothes. I took the blazer out of the closet and there was literally a quarter inch of dust on the shoulders, which I frantically cleaned. Then after trying it on, I noticed the sleeves were an inch too long. Had I always worn it like that? Or had my arms shrunk with age? I could not let Michelle Obama see me this way. So I rushed to my junk drawer to find the old “Stitch Witchery” I bought years ago, because I don’t sew. Remember Stitch Witchery? It’s like a white tape that you iron inside of a hem and it sort of glues the hem in. So there I am…the clock is ticking, my hair is wet, and I’m ironing Stitch Witchery into my ten-year old dusty blazer as my sweet husband is in the driveway in his Pjs washing the bird poop off my car. Ugh.

I finally put myself together and flew out the door. Late, of course. I used every stop sign and traffic light as an opportunity to apply mascara and eyebrows. After missing my exit and having to turn around, I finally arrive in Pasadena to meet Monica, who had spent the morning bedside with her sick son, feverish and vomiting. I met her on the side of the road, where I parked, then jumped into her car, anxious to see what she was wearing.

Monica was looking fabulous in a slip, hot rollers strewn about the car, no makeup and a pile of clothes in the backseat.

HELP! She implored.

“I’m here. Let’s do this.”

We rifled through the clothing choices in the backseat and chose a great outfit. It, too, was an outfit she had not worn in about 8 years, as the designer dress she had just purchased had been ruined at the drycleaners. Of course.

Monica managed to contort her 5”9” frame over and around the steering wheel as she dressed in the front seat of her car, then put her lipstick on while I simultaneously penciled in her eyebrows. Somehow…we pulled ourselves together and drove up the hill to the big event.

The night before, Monica had flown in from San Francisco, where she had attended a memorial service for an old friend. After missing her return flight, she returned to find that someone had attempted to break into her car at LAX and in the process had broken the handle off her door. Monica, in one of her Lucille Ball moments (she has many) had to crawl through the window.

So we pull up in front of this mansion, flustered, insecure, the valet comes to the door and looks at us, cocking her head…Monica picks the door handle up off the floor, “Oh, are you looking for this?”

We laugh, and we know…this is it. Ready or not, here we come.

Monica in her fabulous designer 8-year old outfit

Me - "What Not To Wear"

We spent the next hour in a long line waiting for our pat-down by the Secret Service (woot woot!). While in line with a hundred other women, I blurted out, "Did anyone else here completely stress over what to wear today?” All heads whipped around in my direction. Uh-oh.

“Oh my Lord, YES!” was the overwhelming response. Then one by one women began to tell us their tales of woe…the shopping and not finding, the frantic search, the clothes now lying in piles all over their bedrooms. Every one of us, it seemed, had that Universal feeling that somehow we weren’t “enough” to be in front of the First Lady, that somehow we didn’t belong here. And yet, each of us were invited. (Another universal “Shame” theme…so glad Amy Ferris and I are doing this book on shame. Lordy, it is pervasive).

Anyhoo….back to Michelle Obama’s arms. So we take our seats at our reserved table, next to Star Jones and Eva Marcille- winner of America’s Next Top Model, who says to Monica “Oh I LOVE your outfit!” And I winked at her…TOLD YA. Star Jones was quite lovely, not like that woman she plays on reality shows. She got a bottle of wine from the bar and came back to refill all our glasses. Just as I confidently reach for my mug of wine ( yes, just as Monica and I arrived, they run out of wine glasses so we take our seat next to Star and crew with mugs of wine)  and with horror I notice a long white tape of Stitch Witchery hanging out of my sleeve. Oh screw it!  It was hotter than HADES anyway so I took the damn jacket off and forgot about it for the rest of the day. Which meant I was now free to concentrate on what really mattered - Michelle Obama’s arms.

Eva Marcille, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Areva Martin, Star Jones

Monica and Star:
"Did you see that Stitch Witchery hanging
out of that poor girl's sleeve?"

But as she took the podium and began to speak, all my self- involved worries melted away. What I heard was a woman just like me, who had doubts, who did her best to be brave and stand up for what she believed in, who was striving to be a good mom, a loving and supportive wife, and to do the right thing even when it’s the hardest thing. I learned that the president of the United States calls his wife “Meesh” - I loved that. And I learned something about Michelle Obama’s arms. That they, like mine, comfort her husband at night when it’s been an impossible day, and 

hold her children close to her, just as I do. I learned that we all belonged there on that day and that we are all, as “Meesh” said, in this together.

I learned that clothes do not make the woman (although they help), and that Prada shoes are torturously uncomfortable so who needs 'em (ask Monica) and that what counts is who we are and how we live our lives. 

I also learned that 20 pushups a day are not going to cut it. I gotta get crack-a-lackin’.

Settle Down, Everybody.

(Morning commute. Seriously, how can you be cranky when you live here?)

I mean, really. Can we all just take a step back, breathe…and settle down?

I drove to Santa Monica this morning for a meeting on what was a truly glorious morning in Southern California - a real stunner. Brilliant blue cloudless sky, a teal blue Pacific Ocean with whitecaps, the autumn wind stirring things up, I mean really stirring things up. Including people. All this gorgeous morning, I saw people screaming at each other, cutting each other off in traffic, honking, yelling, and I wondered…where is all the anger in the world coming from right now? Californians are usually polite to each other. We are not “honkers”, generally speaking. We always give the right of way to pedestrians, even when they are clearly wrong. It’s just part of our culture. So what if we’re phony and botoxed up the ying-yang. At least we’re polite.

But not today. Whew, today I felt like I was in Manhattan at rush hour. Driving through hippy dippy mellow Topanga Canyon, two teenagers darted across the road right in front of me causing me to brake, then I came to a stop to make sure there weren’t any more “darters” coming, at which point the SUV behind me lays on the horn. Hey dude, this is Topanga okay? We don’t run people over here, so why don’t you just roll up a fatty and chill out, okay?

As I drove into the heart of Santa Monica, I saw a guy whiz around the corner right through the crosswalk with a devilish look in his eye Yeah that’s right, blonde housewife with your yoga mat, walking your damn Chihuahua across Santa Monica Blvd., you better jump up on the curb! To which said blonde lady screamed ARE YOU F*CKING BLIND? Oh no, no people. We do not behave this way in Santa Monica. We meet for drinks or coffee or yoga. We shop. We lunch. We don’t run pedestrians onto the curb and we don’t curse. Several more screaming incidents later, even the parking attendant was barking at me…and I just decided, you know what? I’m not participating in this madness. I told the rude parking attendant to have a wonderful day, smiled and drove slowly and carefully away.

I don’t know what the hell is going on but people are just freekin’ wound up lately, around politics, around everything. And we all need to calm the f*ck down before things get out of hand. So will you all take a beat today to breathe, and maybe be more patient with others bad behavior, just for today. If we all refuse to participate in the anger, maybe we can turn the heat down a notch.

Talked to my friend Amy this morning, just before I left and she asked me if I’d read my horoscope today.

“No- didn’t have a chance.”

“Oh good,” she said, “Don’t.”

Oy. Now I think I know why.

SANITY PREVAILS!

(Helloooooo Los Angeles!)

I had a great time at the Los Angeles Rally for Sanity yesterday. What I am most happy about is not only the huge turn out in D.C. (CBS estimates 215,000) but the many satellite rallies like ours in Los Angeles, and all over the world! I wonder if all those crowds were tallied, what the grand total would come to? From Alaska to Hawaii, Texas to Minnesota, Illinois, New York all the way to France! ALL OVER THE WORLD! (See http://rallymao.com/ to see all the Sanity rallies that took place yesterday). Pretty cool, huh? It just goes to show you…we are not discouraged and apathetic as the polls and pundits would have you believe. We do care about our country, we will show up and vote. Maybe we aren’t loud and nutballs about it – but we care.

There was a wonderful smattering of unusual characters at the L.A. rally (well it is L.A.) which made it fun.

(I mean, really. Where else can you hang out with a guy dressed as a giant pot leaf?)

But overall, it was filled with calm, rational citizens showing up to support sane politics. Here we were in MacArthur park, which was sort of known to be a tough neighborhood, all walks of life, young and tattooed, old and gray-haired, families with kids running around (like us) watching the D.C. Rally on a Jumbotron Screen together, cheering along.

I saw only two parked cop cars- no police anywhere. It wasn’t necessary. There were a lot of people picking up trash, just to be helpful. It was feel-good day. No anger, no shouting, no hateful racist signs. I think bringing humor and levity to our political situation is the most healing thing we could have done at this point. Laughter is good medicine for what ails us as a country. I love that we are taking politics back with good humor. Hooray for us!

After the Jon Stewart rally ended on the Jumbotron, the crowd thinned out. There was an after-show featuring a flash mob in Halloween costumes doing Thriller (totally cool!) then some L.A. stand up comics, some of them worked blue, and that was uncool. We were in a park in the middle of the day with tons of kids running around, not at the Comedy Store in Hollywood. There was one wingnut in the crowd with a sign about how everyone was going to burn in Hell, or some such thing, and one comic went after him in a really ugly way, and that was NOT what our day was about. Extremism in any form is wrong. That’s my one criticism of the day. (But our rally was organized by an individual organization not affiliated with Jon Stewart.) Other than that it was a great day and I was really proud to be part of it with my family and friends.

(Being interviewed for KCRW - the Warren Ulne Show. You know me...I always have something to say)

Now if we all show up and VOTE on Tuesday, then maybe we won’t have any kooky tea-party candidates in Congress, and we can all (Democrats AND Republicans) breathe a sigh of relief.

Aging Gracefully? What's that?

Let’s talk about something really uncomfortable… It happens to us all, beginning the very moment we are born and continuing until the day we die. Aging. We watch people in our families and communities grow old, and eventually pass away. And yet, we’ve lived in some kind of strange denial that it will never really happen to us. We will never be old. Oh sure, we may joke around about being an old codger one day, but we don’t really mean it. We’re young, hip, cool, trendy. We can do anything; cartwheels, mountain climbing, running marathons. We hustle through life with kids strapped to our backs or on our hips, multi tasking, flying at the speed of sound. We can do it all until…one day, we can’t.

One morning you wake up and you’re achy for no good reason. One day you’re in a restaurant “playing trombone” with the menu. Or you catch your reflection in a window at the mall and you don’t recognize yourself. (Oh the horror of fluorescent lighting!).

Well, it certainly won’t be happening to me, because I’ve done all the right things. I eat the Doctor Oz foods, I exercise, and I use anti-aging products. Ha!

Those words “anti-aging” are a flat out lie! There is no way to stop aging unless you can stop time. We are all aging, and the sooner we come out of denial about it, the better we’ll all feel (and maybe if we weren’t so freekin’ stressed about it, we wouldn’t age as fast!).

I deeply resent seeing twenty-five-year-old airbrushed models in ads for “anti-aging” products. They want you to believe that this is what an older woman can and should look like. Again, let me assure you ladies, it is a LIE. You can take great care of yourself and have great skin, but you will not look twenty-five when you are forty-five. Let’s all embrace this truth. Okay?

I think it’s terribly sad the way we vilify the aging process, and cast out our elders. We push them far, far away from us. We put them in “assisted living facilities”. Keep them out of our homes, out of our societies. Pay as much money as it takes to keep them at bay.

And on some level we’re doing that to our aging selves as well. We bury our faces under injected synthetic fillers, and when that doesn’t work, we have surgery to remove our old faces and bodies. Oh, what will history say about this strange era we live in?

Personally, I am exhausted by the struggle. Every day I surrender a little more to the inevitable, but still there is this shame that creeps in to my psyche when I look in the mirror and I see the softening of my jawline, or the bags under my eyes in the morning. Although I know it makes no sense logically, I feel like I am letting society down! There are no longer any role models in the media who look like me at age 46. They all look 30. What I see on television and in magazines doesn’t reflect a standard that I can live up to, unless I give in and start injecting botox and restylene and get an eye lift…ugh.

This whole aging thing is hitting me right in the pocketbook. I have made my living as an entertainer, and suddenly, the gigs aren’t rolling in like they used to. The entertainment industry doesn’t find my aging to be a desirable quality. And so I suit up for inner battle with the toxic societal message that has subtly nestled itself into my subconscious, and it’s a particularly fierce battle because I live in L.A.

Dammit! I just want to look like me. I want to be authentic, and embrace the truth of who I am on every level. My face tells a story. I have pronounced laugh lines around my eyes, and smile lines around my mouth. I’ve laughed a lot in my life, and shouldn’t that be a good thing? I also have heavy eyelids, and circles under my eyes. Okay, so I’ve cried a lot too, but I’ve survived some dark stuff. My eyes are my badge of courage. And through them I am learning to see myself differently.

I can’t honestly think of anything truly positive about the physical process of aging. I mean, that part pretty much sucks 100%. I have not enjoyed losing my eyesight, my jawline, and my physical strength. I don’t appreciate that I have to work out twice as hard and eat half as much just to maintain my previous weight. Not fair at all. But on a deeper level, If we’re doing it right, we are growing better every day spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually.

Whenever I am struggling with a tough issue like this, I look for the positive and remind myself how much there is to be grateful for. So let me give that a try (grumble, grumble, grumble...).

For me, this is what is good, or even GREAT, about aging:

I am more confident and sure of myself than I’ve ever been.

I am at peace.

I have learned to roll with the punches in life, and to accept a lot of what I used to resist.

I don’t give a rat’s ass what others think of me.

I have raised wonderful children who I am proud of.

I have wisdom and experience.

I still have an adventurous youthful spirit.

I do yoga, run, hike, travel, and I plan to do so until my last day on Earth.

I am learning every day.

I have choices every day.

I am more patient with myself, and with others.

I have made peace with my past.

I am so grateful for the experiences I’ve had, good and bad

I am softer to hug.

I am softer.

So, aging gracefully? I’m not really sure what that means, or if I know anyone who’s doing it. I think what I’m doing personally is aging awkwardly, and begrudgingly. But I’m gonna keep on doing it every day, whether I like it or not. I can sail through it, or be dragged through it kicking and screaming (which I’ve done at times…). Perhaps sailing is the better (less painful) way.

I’ll tell you this - I wouldn’t go back to my twenties for a million bucks. And all the things I gripe about now at 46, I know I will be wistful for when I’m 66. So, note to self: Life is good. Shut off the noise coming at you from the media. Don’t look at the magazines. Appreciate the true beauty in your life, scratch beneath the surface for the deeper, better stuff.

And to sum it up, learn how to Age Gratefully.