Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Old + Woman = Need for Sharper Elbows
It’s a double whammy. Being old – as in significantly old – and being a woman. You might as well have the word irrelevant tattooed across your forehead. Don’t pay any attention to me, your face says. I might have been smart as a whip at one time but now I’m thin and intellectually wispy, a doily of a person.
I push against this in the work I do for free. I show up and speak up. I represent. Sometimes, I wear this shirt. I really do. Even though it’s a tad too small and I feel pretty busty in it. But people who can’t handle a 75-year-old woman in a tight t-shirt can, well.
There is a risk of becoming a caricature, a person who is so unwilling to adjust to the forces of history that they become cartoonish in their tiny shows of resistance. A t-shirt. For heaven’s sake. That’s my emblem.
Oh well.
I have other t-shirts with somewhat belligerent sayings, but I like this one best. It speaks the truth.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
YES!!!
Love this shirt and all it represents
Delightful shirt! I overheard two young men complaining about a girl’s hormones. I smiled at them and said, “Did you know that after menopause, men have more hormones than women, including more estrogen? Women’s hormones stop, but estrogen is a byproduct of testosterone. You will have your turn to be hormonal.” They looked horrified and escaped. Heh, heh, heh.
That shirt is one of my favorites. I like the concept of speaking bluntly without saying a word.
I comfort myself with the thought that her ‘Little-old-lady-ness’ was Miss Marple’s superpower, she took her assumed irrelevance and ran with it! 🙂