I wish I would have enjoyed it more…

Here comes the rant… Why in the world do old women insist on wearing little sleeveless black mini-dresses??? Even if you work out and are in shape, your elbows slide when you age. Here are these skinny crepe-paper brown arms dangling off a tiny bone-structure and these mildly wrinkled straw-haired women wearing too much make-up and laughing too loud, trying to impress the loser men that stroll through the place, holding drinks and eyeing my daughter. It is so repulsive.

There were some women who dressed appropriately… longer sleeves, more natural make-up. They retained their dignity and were genuinely attractive as they chatted and danced. The thing is, most of those women were already with men. (Do you wonder why?) The straw-haired, black eye-lined women were generally with other straw-haired black eye-lined women.

And the younger ones had some equally bad fashion sense!!! Girls my daughter’s age who weighed well over 250 lbs. were wearing tight black halter tops. Their sequoya sized arms measuring larger than my daughter’s thigh, spread out against their large bodies with a paleness that shouted FAT FAT FAT!!! On the other hand, there were some generously sized women who looked like they were having a good time and actually dressed more like Emme or somebody with better sense. Fat does not have to be unfashionable or unsexy.

Both the ones who could get away with it and the ones that couldn’t were wearing spikey heels and four inch mini-skirts. So, many who could have looked gorgeous came across as looking sleazy.

To top it off, it was a two-story club, so you could look down on the dance floor. That’s how I noticed all this stuff (I’m generally not nearly this critical and catty… I usually don’t even notice.) Anyway, both men and women were bouncing around in all sorts of foolish gyrations. We chuckled at the Jesse Ventura look-alike who appeared to march in place instead of dance. And we shook our heads at the Bridget Bardot wannabe in an off the shoulder loud black and white striped shirt. Again there was the straw hair, but this one had to be in her late sixties, at least, and looked like Bridget looks today.

I know I sound like such a b***ch, but I just don’t understand how perfectly fine looking women can work so hard to screw up their looks! The feeling in my solar plexus… that punch in the stomach feeling… tells me that they all do it for the same reasons I’m here cursing out the fact that I’m aging. We all hate it… we all try to deal with it. Some of us just get bitter and critical, others of us I guess try to pretend nobody notices. Either way, it’s not very attractive, is it?

And then, of course, the ones I ‘hated’ the most were not the ones I described above. The ones I really hated were those between the ages of 21 and 37 who wore the little black dresses at just the right length, with feminine firm arms that gracefully arched the air as they danced. Smiling at their man and moving in sensual but pretty moves, they looked sparkly and fun and completely likable, respectable, but sexy and as if they’d be easy to fall in love with.

And, no, I didn’t really hate them. I just hated that they weren’t me anymore. No more delicate arms, no more admiring looks from young guys, no more belle of the ball. No more shaking my hair out of my eyes in an abandoned and alluring way, no more feeling the glance of even the sleazy old guys.

I always tell my daughters, enjoy what you’ve got now because it won’t always be that way. I wasted so much time thinking I was too fat or my hair was too short or my nose too long and now I look back on my photos and see what the forty-something old women saw when they looked at me and I wish I would have enjoyed it more. I’m glad I enjoyed it as much as I did, but I thought that it was all me, that I would always have these few charms. Instead, it was all youth, and the charms sagged away slowly but unrelentlessly.

Okay, NOW I’m in a great mood. 🙁 Well, I actually didn’t look so bad when I went out Friday night. I don’t have any wrinkles really yet, but I guess the whole arm thing really gets to me. Legs on the other thing seem to be one of the last things to go. I’ve got to admit that even the straw-heads could carry off a short skirt… although not a sleazy micro-mini. My legs, however, are not so good any more, so I didn’t even have that. I’m just afraid that when I’m in my seventies, I’m going to look back on my pictures now and think… I wish I would have enjoyed it more when I was forty-seven.