Beauty Is As Beauty Does

Sometimes I look in the mirror and I wonder – how far are you, Jan, from being a crazy old lady who cuts her own hair with the poultry shears.

I think it’s a very thin line. One day I’ll wake up and just say, what the fuck! I can just cut my own damn hair. And from then on I’ll wear extra large t-shirts from car dealerships and the yoga pants I bought at Goodwill last Friday and have worn every day since.

Oh, some dear reader will say, who cares how we look. It’s our inner beauty that counts. We are all God’s children, the perfectly dressed and the unraveling attired alike. Don’t you worry, Jan, they’ll console me, their disgust for my superficiality dripping from their sweet words. The ‘you don’t need to care how you look, dear’ comments will fight amongst themselves for territory – you’re so old now, it doesn’t matter,hon; you’re an activist, they never dress well; makeup and great clothes are part of the capitalist scheme to make us want what we don’t have and can never be.

All of this came to a head this week at a big event for my wee nonprofit, Time of the Month Club, a group that collects menstrual supplies for women who are homeless. It was our first ever lunch – with sponsors and monogrammed cups, speakers, 50 women in a room, a very big deal.

Anyway, I wore a skirt with pantyhose. Like I was 800 years old. I did this because, dear reader, my pants shrank In the wash. Yes, my favorite dress pants, the decidedly chic black number with the just right height length, super comfy and sleek, shrank to a pair of tight pedal pushers. I’ve had a problem with dress capris in the past because, for some reason, even though I’m not real athletic, I have calves like a linebacker so my capris would always get stuck like Grandma’s when she was gardening.

And the pantyhose. Jesus. I cannot with the bare legs. My legs, which are nice legs, I have to say, the oversized calves notwithstanding, are freckled, spotted, dimpled, stretched, veined, and mottled, most of all mottled. So going bare legged with a skirt is a no can do. But when I looked down at my legs at the lunch, waiting for one of the speakers to wrap up so I could continue my emceeing job, I couldn’t believe I was wearing pantyhose. I felt like a nun having a wild night on the town.

I did wear red shoes, though. It made me feel like the Pope. The Pope wears red shoes, why I don’t know. So the red shoes added a papal flair to my attire – my skirt and my nun pantyhose. It was an ensemble topped off by a fabulous shirt with streaks of black and red. I love that shirt. It’s so emphatic and seemed so right for an event talking about women and their periods.

The event was a success. A lot of women came. The lunch was wonderful. The speakers were amazing. I stood in front of everyone, my old lady self, and talked about women and homelessness as if nothing else in the world mattered, just talked as if my heart was in my hands and I was passing it around for people to look at like show and tell in the third grade. This is who I am, this is what I believe. And I was beautiful in that moment, if only to myself. It was righteous and fine.