I Am An Old Woman Named After My Mother . . .

Oh, what a great song -- John Prine's Angel from Montgomery. I'm not that old woman, I'm a different old woman. I'm an old woman hanging out in a dressing room. I'm doing the same thing I've done for five decades now -- stripping down, shoving in, lacing up, draping, slathering face paint and pinning curls. Happy as a clam and sad as a turnip. It's life and it's not life, all at the same time. I am not an actress who loves being the center of attention, who loves being looked at -- don't get me wrong, I want to want to be looked at and I want to want to be adored, but it does not come naturally to me AT ALL. I do this, and have always done this, to disappear into someone else -- to find myself through the experience of others, to learn about the human condition through experiences that I likely will never have. I have a horrible fear of heights, for instance. Horrible. Yet, I've been staged at great heights. How did I manage? I created characters who had no fear of heights. Easy peasy. Right now I am experiencing being an elderly grande dame in 1895 London in Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. I've often played older characters, but I was never old doing it. Now, there is no need to create wrinkles. I just do what any older person does -- put on makeup to hide them!

I share the dressing room with three young, beautiful, talented and very energetic young ladies. They still have hope. They are nimble. They embrace all the things. I was nimble once. I saw the future coming and paid people to teach me things so I could keep pace -- we didn't have YouTube then. What is amazing to me is that it's never stopped. It hasn't even paused. It just accelerates. It is changing at such a rapid pace that what was valid in 2025 is archaic in 2026. And I guess I'm slowing down. I am not at all happy to admit it, but I can no longer jump between computer screens in a split second like I once did. And memorizing lines is a process. When Sir Laurence Olivier said he used cue cards because if he had to memorize movie dialogue it would displace the Shakespeare that lived in his mind, I thought that was some silly excuse to be lazy. I was young. And energetic. And exuberant. And thought it would never change. Now I get it. Oh boy do I get it. Bring on the CUE CARDS!

The fun of being in this dressing room is listening. It's like being from another planet. They primp and tie their corsets as tight as they can and jump and are exuberant. ALL THE TIME! I am learning so much -- about content, more content and even more content, and followers, and separate accounts, and public versus private, and getting jobs from Instagram. And INFLUENCERS. WHAT?????????????????? Apparently, none of this is a passing fancy. I seem to be the last to know.

And I tell them who Peter Stuyvesant was. And the meaning of "curate." And the color of heliotrope. And I loosen my corset. And I sag.

I AM AN OLD WOMAN. . . NAMED AFTER MY MOTHER . . .