OF A CERTAIN AGE: Candace bergen & the scarves

By Alice Kuo Shippee

I’m at the age now where I look better if I wear a high ponytail, the poor woman’s facelift. I’m not a particularly vain person, but I think I am a self-conscious one when it comes to my appearance when I’ve crossed a certain threshold of weight or girth or slack or the 20 random white pubic hair-like wires that sprout from my off center part.

Gal pals all poo poo away our concerns with absolutely authentic cheers of, “Girl, you look amazing!” But the best of the besties also let you gripe away. They get it that past 40 or 45 or 50, things change. It was right around 45 for me when I quit sugar and suddenly all the inflammation in my body left, & my neck decided it would deflate. I saw a photo of me, and I didn’t recognize the skin under my chin. What was that? A weird shadow? Nope. It was vertical chords, the lines I thought looked so cool when I was a young ballet dancer. The lines that extended from my collarbones to my jawline in a V that you could twang like guitar strings. I used to love those lines. But at 45, they were different. They didn’t spring back and disappear when I turned my head.

And then a couple of years later, two distinct horizontal lines appeared around the front of my neck, and so now I had a tic-tac-toe board on my throat.

Out of the recesses of my memory, I remembered Candace Bergen, who was a contemporary of my mother. My mom loved Bergen’s show Murphy Brown, and I recalled how the strong, independent character wore lots of high collars and scarves. Always chic. But now I know why she wore them. Her show was hit when Bergen was in her 40’s—and the show was on the air for ten years. Bergen got to age on the small screen over the decade that is middle age, over 260 episodes, as she went from a beautiful woman just starting her 40’s to a beautiful, but older, woman just starting her 50’s. It’s not an easy era for anyone. And while people joke about coming of age for child actors, going through the awkward years, I think that the later years might be harder.

In 2020, Amy Schumer made the deeply satirical skit and head-shakingly hilarious, “Last Fuckable Day” starring Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquette. Amy stumbles upon a picnic at which the ladies, all of her idols, are celebrating “Julia’s Last Fuckable Day,” which she explains as “In every actress’s life, the media decides when you finally reach the point where you’re not believably fuckable.” Amy asks who gets to decide that, and the women explain that it’s not overt, but one of the signs is when they start dressing you in long sleeves and big sweaters.

Sigh.

Well, I don’t buy into any of that, of course. I completely believe 100% that women are fuckable until whenever they don’t want to be. And they can be sexy and shape or size, whether they wear Birkenstocks or Loubatins. I do, I really do.

And yet, I get the scarves, Candace. And I wonder if it was your idea…or theirs.

And I get why my mom started wanting to wear sunglasses in all her photos at a certain age. My aesthetician isn’t wrong when she says that I sleep more on my left side than my right—& that there’s also more sun damage on that side from all the hours of LA driving. Yup, the year around sun that we all love as been slowly roasting my face through the driver’s side window, or so says the crepe-y eyelid skin.

My therapist always reminds me that things are “both-and:” You can feel two completely contradictory things at the same time. I am both incredibly grateful that I am here & healthy. When I told my doctor, “Aging sucks,” he replied, “It’s better than the alternative.” 100% true. And I can feel a little petulant about the way my skin feels and looks, no matter how much water I drink. The way my muscles take twice as long to tighten with exercise and only retain the benefits for half as long as before. The way my hairline is giving Morticia Addams a run for First Place of the Highest Forehead (or Fivehead, as my husband likes to joke about his own hairline). The way that everything is just different now.

I drove my 1994 Honda Civid for almost 20 years. And when she started to have some issues, I was very understanding. She was mechanical and electrical, and of course things would break down after a couple of decades. And our bodies are not so different—susceptible to heat and cold, run harder and longer on some days than others, incredibly reliable until accidents occur. Here I am, past the half century mark, and I think I should celebrate myself as much as I did my Civic. I did sell her for $500 in the end, and I wondered how long she ran after that.

And I don’t mind scarves. On the days in LA when the sun isn’t insidiously baking my skin, I’ll take cool weather as an opportunity for fashion.

Last year, on my 52nd birthday, I took a selfie to celebrate treating myself to a favorite smoothie. I was startled by how my neck looked, so I channeled Candace and utilized the scarf I was already wearing. I know there’s nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. Neck skin is normal. But hey, scarves work in California in November.