So I’m hiding out in a Starbucks doing chemistry homework (I don’t know why, but the rice crispie bars help me think about chemistry, they totally do) when a petite blonde settles at a table near the window. This is a Starbucks in Studio City, on Ventura, so it’s a bit of luxe, a bit of see & be seen, so I’m not ENTIRELY surprised at the fur-topped boots ending her jeans, nor at what she’s purchased, to wit: the world’s tiniest, most perfect glass bottle of Pellegrino and the world’s tiniest, most perfect half sandwich in a plastic box.
Nor am I surprised that she’s got a beribboned bag from Papyrus. But the needle starts rising when she pulls from said bag a Votivo candle (which I recognize, from assistant days, and remember as running - then - at $25 a pop), which she lights, the better to create ambiance with which to enjoy these half servings of bread and water.
It’s such a comedy! But my class-and-aesthetics objections to the candle shrivel up and die in under half a minute, because Votivo gives its customers something for the money, and not only does the immediate vicinity smell better, somehow everything in the immediate vicinity has *become* better. It’s a lot to accomplish with wax. So I watch, in kind of ambivalent admiration, now, as she picks up and begins to read the paper. I begin to wonder who she is. Is she like Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club, two generations later, with her tiny/perfect preserve of luxury? All I can see is blonde hair, t-shirt, jeans, and a handbag the price of a car. Maybe she’s some sylph from Manhattan Beach slumming it in the Valley? She gets up for a napkin.
And coming back, I see her face. And you’ve all gotten here before me, I’m sure. But I’m surprised to realize she’s at least in her 40s. In a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. With the hair of a woman under half her age. And a shock and awe of an entirely different kind settles in. Because this woman is the norm, now, of a certain kind of power. Immediately I can place her - high level executive of Dreamworks/Universal/Warner Brothers - or, considering the Mouse - Disney. She does yoga, she lives on little Pellegrinos, and most of all that money and that power goes to back up and make seem serious just one thing: she’s afraid to be her age. It’s kind of funny, but I don’t dare laugh, I’m sure no-one around her and all the other women around her dares either. And whatever she does - greenlight movies, run ad campaigns, make or wreck lives, isn’t there for itself, but just backs up the one demand - that she be perceived as young.
I with my rice crispie bar (still happily freeloading off her candle) remake one of my personal vows: to grow up to be a person who can grow old.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 alexandra // Nov 5, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Wonderful conclusion.
You do not just describe Starbucks but pretty much 97% of the Los Angeles population, 23-50.
Somehow looking your age is awful.
When did being “old” become a curse?
Oh right, when everyone realized it meant they could no longer be a sex symbol….
2 Karin // Nov 7, 2007 at 2:14 am
The thing that’s weird is that these older women aren’t even trying to be older-woman-sexy. Helen Mirren will be smiling that coy smile on magazine covers, wearing plunging necklines and feather fans and what-all-else for another half decade at least, I’d bet money. She’s not trying to play young.
I wonder what it would take for these other women to make the jump.
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