Writer Vixen Explains It All

The Age Thing (Redux)

Best of Writer Vixen

When I was in my mid-20s I was quite a dish. I was blonde and bubbly and eager-to-please. I tended to believe the things people told me, especially things they told me about me. I didn’t know whether I was smart, mostly because some people thought I was kind of brilliant while others thought—or assumed—that I wasn’t very bright. It was very confusing to me—especially since the fact that I was an outstanding student at top-tier schools seemed somehow irrelevant to this calculus.

Around this time I went to a New Year’s Eve party hosted by a hot-shot Wall Street money guy who later did white-collar prison time for insider trading. He lived with his 25-years-younger girlfriend in a Fifth Avenue penthouse with a wraparound view of Manhattan. I was studying architecture at Parsons, and in typical grad student style I’d go pretty much anywhere on the promise of a free meal. So although this promised to be a tiresome evening of my-toys-are-bigger-than-your-toys one-upmanship, I cheerfully accepted the invitation.

Most of the guests were couples in their 40s and 50s. The men struck me as one-note bores (my date the exception), but I found the women fascinating. They all seemed so chic and accomplished and self-assured, and I couldn’t wait to meet them. Always in the throes of trying to figure out who I wanted to become in my life, I was sure that they knew things, things that I needed to know, things about being chic and accomplished and self-assured.

The Age Thing, or "It Only Hurts When I Lie"

By Colleen Wainwright

Colleen Wainwright is an LA-based writer-speaker-illuminator who started calling herself “the communicatrix” when she hit three hyphens. An award-winning TV copywriter in a former life, Colleen now spends her time teaching other creative souls how to talk about what they do in a way that wins them attention, work and satisfaction.

The following essay was originally published on Communicatrix on 10 July 2006.

After my recent stumping for the sisterhood, this is going to sound like a reversalist smackdown, but a story in this Sunday’s LA Times (I know, I know, but I like the ritual of fresh comics in bed) set me off. Big time. And I tried to ignore it—really, I did—but here I am, a day later, still cheesed off.

It was more than a story: the Times devoted their entire Sunday magazine to the issue of aging and its attendant hoo-hah in modern society—how we try to stop it, how we try to look like we’re stopping it, how we succeed (or fail) at both. Not a lot of insight or exploration into why we chase the dragon, but hey—this is L.A., it’s the Times, and that’s probably a given, right? Because it’s better to be young, dumbass!

Confessions of an Accidental Beauty Queen

 

Best of Writer Vixen

The emcee’s voice boomed through the auditorium, but I didn’t hear it so much as feel it reverberating through me. All I could actually hear was the sound of my heart pounding. I knew my family and friends were cheering from somewhere in the packed house, but I co uldn’t see them. I was blinded by the white-hot lights that engulfed me and the other four girls as we waited at the center of the stage. 

How on Earth had I gotten here?!

I’d been drafted into the Miss Fairfax pageant on a dare. My goals were modest: to make it farther than Maggie Miller and to avoid humiliating myself in the process. While I hoped to succeed at the first, I was desperate to achieve the second. I figured that just surviving the first cut from 50 girls to 25 would suffice to laugh off the whole thing. In the unlikely event that I made it past the second cut to 15 girls then I could retire with pride. And Maggie could choke on it. Making it to the final five had never been part of the plan and now I was the one choking.

If You Can't Get a Life, at Least Get a Clue

Best of Writer Vixen: Originally posted May 2007

I had lunch at Café Rouge in Berkeley on Saturday afternoon (still the best cheeseburger in the entire Bay Area). As I sat at the bar flipping through Sue Ostler’s Relationships that Rock!—research for my latest literary idea about a series on successful singledom—a demanding, nicotine-edged voice intruded on my reveries.

“Relationships that Rock! . . . Is that a book about marriage?” The voice insisting on my attention emanated from the expensively dressed, perfectly manicured woman of a certain age seated to my right. She was washing down the last of her linguine primavera with the last of her second martini.

“Actually,” I replied, “It’s about being happily single.”

“Being single sucks!” she declared loudly.

Embarrassed for her, I looked away as I sipped my Diet Coke. Undeterred, she turned to the 30-something bartender with the trim beard who was trying to suppress a smile as he cleared away her plate. “I’ve been single since 1968 so I should know what I’m talking about!”