Tag Archives: Concepts

When a Relationship’s Private Moments Become Public

06 Tuesday May 2014

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The Big Heat Eats Woolf.

BY JULIE SEYLER

Is it true that every man and woman in a relationship tests each other’s patience to the point where sometimes each behaves like a raving maniac? The word “every” is heavy-handed, but I’ll bet that, at some time, for some people, both gay and straight, who are in long-term, monogamous relationships, vocal differences between intimate partners can get ugly.

I have a friend who said that once her hormones moved on and out, the screaming matches with her husband went south.

I know a clinical psychologist who affirms that managing, and maintaining, a relationship over the long-haul is harder than any job because we are not programmed for monogamy. She says the only difference between the 50% that stay together and the 50% who don’t, is commitment because frustration, and having one’s patience tested, is an inherent part of the deal.

These musings arose because there was an article in the paper recently that the singer Paul Simon and his wife of 20 years, Edie Brickell, had ended up in a Connecticut court house to explain that their screaming match had been an “argument.”

The police had gotten an anonymous tip about a domestic dispute with possible physical ramifications. The article was vague on whether this person heard only words, or whether someone had crossed the line. But because this duet is a celebrity pairing, nothing stayed anonymous.

A public explanation of the dispute had to be offered and so Ms. Brickell announced:

I got my feelings hurt, and I picked a fight with my husband. The police called it disorderly. Thank God it’s orderly now.

Who wants their fights aired in The New York Times? Certainly any type of physical abuse is on a whole different planet, but this seemed to be about a bad fight. Perhaps one that had escalated to a different level, but the idea that good relationships don’t have some really bad moments is a myth. I feel for the couple. How embarrassing to have such private moments be made public because of your success.

Spring to Life, Persephone!

18 Friday Apr 2014

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yellow sunflower

BY JULIE SEYLER

It’s spring. At least the vernal equinox announcing the change of seasons arrived on March 20. Despite the frost and snow that hit us in New York and New Jersey a few days ago, I have faith spring is about to pop in full blast. Hopefully, it will hang long enough before we are slam-dunked into a 100- degree heat wave. (The ironic joke of this obstreperous winter.)

Meanwhile, according to Greek mythology, the only reason we have spring is due to devoted mother love. One day, the goddess Persephone, daughter of Demeter, goddess of corn, grain and the harvest, was playing with her Nymph pals in a field. Hades, the god that ruled the underworld, abducted her.

Bernini’s sculpture “The Rape of Persephone,” in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, depicts the massive strength of Hades, known as Pluto in Roman mythology, as he digs his hands into the goddess’s flesh. (Even in the hard marble, you can see the tenderness of her skin.):

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, "The Rape of Persephone", 1621-22.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, “The Rape of Persephone” 1621-22.

After Persephone is carried off, her mother searches all the world for her, but to no avail, and in so doing, neglects her duties:

‘Ungrateful soil, said she, ‘which I have endowed with fertility and clothed with herbage and nourishing grain, no more shall you enjoy my favours.’ Then the cattle died, the plough broke in the furrow, the seed failed to come up, there was too much sun, there was too much rain, the birds stole the seeds-thistles and brambles were the only growth.
~ The Age of Fable in Bulfinch’s Mythology.

Demeter finally learns that Persephone is alive but stuck down below. She begs Zeus, the most powerful god on Mount Olympus, to allow Persephone to return to the earth. He agrees on one condition. Her daughter must not consume a single morsel of food. But Hades is a trickster, and through wily self-preservation presents his wife with a delectable piece of fruit – the pomegranate. She eats a few of the seeds, and as a result, can never be completely free.pomegrante

Instead she is allowed to return for six months of the year, and as her daughter comes back, Demeter does her job. Flowers bloom and vegetables grow, and we revel in the beauty of spring.

So let’s tell Perspehone to stop playing hide and seek. We are so ready for her!

Want a Classy Name? Put an “E” on It

11 Friday Apr 2014

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Bob estates

BY BOB SMITH

The people who name residential and retail developments always pick names that sound classy – or at least that they think will sound classy to the rest of us. For instance, if there’s a stream of any kind flowing near the property, they include the term “brook” in the title. And if they really want to be fancy, they spell it “brooke.” They seem to think that the linguistic extravagance of having a useless, silent vowel at the ends of words screams opulence:

“Hey – we know there’s an extraneous ‘e’ there, but dammit, we can afford it.”

If there’s a bridge across the “brooke,” then the namer has two choices. The first is to coin a “bridge” word by pairing it with any descriptive, or other cool-sounding term (e.g., Woodbridge, Westbridge, Longbridge, Cambridge, Bumbridge, etc.). The beauty of “bridge” is that it comes with its own silent, trailing “e,” so it pairs well with the other pretentious words in the name.

Then couple your newly-minted, “bridge” word with another term that purports to describe the nature of the homes being offered for sale, such as “Estates,” “Manor,” or the highfalutin, “Mews.” I can see “Estates” and “Manor” evoking luxury, since both terms refer to pieces of real estate owned by feudal lords – although I doubt any self-respecting lord, feudal or otherwise, would stoop to live in a McMansion on a quarter-acre lot in New Jersey.

But “mews?” In British usage, the word means stables built around a small street, or a street having small apartments converted from such stables, neither of which seem like particularly enviable places to live, unless you’re a horse. On the other hand, it could make for a pleasant-sounding, vaguely evocative name:”Neighbridge Mews.”

The other option for naming a development, including any kind of bridge, is to pick an upscale term for “bridge,” and feature that up front: “The Crossings at _____.” You could even double down on the bridge theme, and construct a name like, “The Crossings at Neighbridge Mews.” Or throw in another extra “e” word for good measure: “The Crossings at Neighbridge Mews Pointe.” Fun, isn’t it?

The same basic rules apply to naming retail areas: “old” becomes “olde,” “center” is “centre,” and “town” becomes “towne.” They’re all pronounced the same as the lower-class versions, but because of the trailing “e,” they’re classier, and just plain better. And of course, if there are any stores in the center of this old town, they’re not “shops,” but “shoppes.”

Here’s the lineup the developers want you to expect, depending on the spelling:

Olde Brooke Towne Centre Shoppes: Tiffany jewelry store, yogalates studio, organic vegan wrap and smoothie bar, a full-menu Starbucks, and hand-crafted, boutique clothing by Zoe, tastefully presented in an exclusive, village-like cluster of gleaming mahogany and glass storefronts. All on the banks of a pristine stream filled with darting minnows, dotted with stepping stones, and spanned by a carved teak footbridge.

Old Brook Town Center Shops: a 1970s vintage strip mall featuring, Pawn It – We Buy Gold, a mani/pedi joint called Nail Me, deli/newsstand, 24-hour laundromat, and a concrete bunker with welded steel cages on the windows and the words, “Check Cashing / Payday Loans,” in five-foot-high letters dominating the entire side wall of the building.

The bail bondsman’s office is just around the corner, downstairs from the Happy Lucky Massage Parlor, and next door to the Amble Inn Bar. All bordered by a weedy trench, filled with sludgy goop sprouting a rusting refrigerator door, old sneakers, and puddles of fluorescent fluid, that in some alternate universe passes for water.

Where would you rather shoppe? Pointe taken.

“Big Brother” (And Everyone Else) is Watching

08 Tuesday Apr 2014

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Big eyes and big ears is watching you!

Big eyes and big ears are watching you!

BY JULIE SEYLER

What strikes me, repeatedly, is how much distance the world has traveled from the way I remember things used to be. This past month, there was a flurry of articles detailing developments on how we, the consumers, are being observed from every angle. George Orwell nailed it in “1984,” where he wrote, “Big Brother is watching you!”

And it’s not just the NSA. It’s the marketing departments of every large corporation.

It is not breaking news that we are monitored for the music we listen to, the books we read, and the tuna fish we buy. But the extent to which our tastes are being quantified and categorized has led me to delete my Pandora app. Hypocritically, I have not stopped shopping at Amazon, the biggest data collector of all. (I guess convenience trumps outrage.)

Nonetheless, an article in The New York Times on March 6 that stated the chief executive of Spotify had acquired Echo Nest to help Spotify “improve the customer experience” by giving its 24 million users better suggestions about what songs to listen to caught my eye. I could only interpret this as meaning that every time me, or you, log on to Spotify, we are contributing to the systematized homogenization of musical taste.

Spotify is not alone. The business of “examining what songs are being listened to by whom, and how,” is a small, but burgeoning, field because “major media companies like Sirius XM, Clear Channel and Univision” eat up the data as food for the production of music-related apps that can be sold to you to shape popular taste and, thereby, sales.

So every time we tune in to tune up our personalized music accounts, marketing is gathering and digitizing the bits and pieces of our predilections to create a composite template of “the consumer.” Who we are, what we buy and how we think:

Pandora said it had begun selling political ads based on the listening patterns of its 75 million users — Bob Marley fans are usually Democrats, for example, while gospel and country listeners lean Republican.

And, if that is privacy trampled by distance, think of Google Glasses as the up-close-and-personal version. Besides being the wearable gadget that keeps you wired to the computer screen 24/7, it allows customer service to track your every move in their effort to better serve you. Virgin Air is currently using Google Glasses, on an experimental basis, to see if they can improve the travel experience:

Kenneth Charles, a Virgin customer service agent, picked up Mr. Jones’s suitcase and peered at him through a Google Glass headset, which had been informed of Mr. Jones’s arrival by the driver of the limo, a pickup service provided by the airline to its most-valued customers.

Without breaking eye contact with his guest, Mr. Charles consulted the virtual reality glasses to verify the details of Mr. Jones’s flight to Newark, N.J. He also confirmed the other data Virgin had on file for Mr. Jones, including his passport information, frequent flier status and whether he had completed the necessary customs and immigration formalities for travel from London to the United States.

I assume Virgin even knew what their “guest” had eaten for breakfast so it could tailor his meals on board to fit his diet.

That the unknown eyes and ears of marketing departments peer into our living rooms to better enhance their bottom line is a phenomenon that was in place when I was growing up in the ’70s, and no doubt way before. But the lack of technological knowledge kept the digging at arm’s length. Computer evolution has broken down these safeguards. Big brother watches all the time.

I do not want to be an atavistic dinosaur – unconnected to the world as it moves like a bullet train into technocracy. But I am experiencing deep-seated angst at the pace with which the world turns. We have gone way past sands through an hourglass.

Weddings Today: Short on Ceremony, Long on Food Stations

07 Monday Apr 2014

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Frank wedding cake

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

I had an interesting cultural experience recently when I attended a wedding of two friends of my daughter. Since these were not relatives, and in fact were people I hardly knew, I was able to sit back and take a dispassionate look at the state of wedding culture today. Being over 60 gives me the perspective of a parent, and the fact that I still have an unmarried daughter adds some relevance to the matter.

You should know up front that this was an Italian wedding, though not the Italian Football Wedding Pat Cooper spoofed 50 years ago. This was a classy affair in a high-rent-district wedding facility. But years ago, this would have been the site of just the reception after a church wedding. Now, it housed both the wedding and the reception. That’s because many young people no longer want to jump through the hoops required by the Catholic Church to receive the sacrament of matrimony. So they forego the sacramental church wedding and are married by a deacon or justice of the peace. That’s a fundamental change over the past 40 years.

So everyone gathers for the ceremony in a chapel provided by the facility. The ceremony is short and sweet:
Do you take him?
Do you take her?
You’re married!

And of course, the last thing the presider at a wedding always says no matter whether it’s in church or on a beach is, “You may kiss the bride.”
Frank wedding article
So we always have the money shot of the two people kissing just before they head down the aisle.

This time, as I watched the bride and groom kiss, suddenly the words of the Paul Williams song made famous by the Carpenters started playing in my mind, “A kiss for luck and we’re on our way.” The bride and groom bound down the aisle, but no one throws anything anymore. Years ago, people threw rice, and later, the more ecologically-minded moved to birdseed and bubbles. Now we seem to have given up on it altogether. That’s fine with me. Let the cocktail hour begin!

So we all walked over to a nearby hall where the latest wedding innovation was in evidence – stations. Where we once had cocktails at a bar while waiters roamed with hors d’oeuvres, now we have a shellfish station, a meat station, a salad station, a pasta station. At this wedding, there was even a sliders station. I think stations are a big improvement over the old days. In fact, I ate so much at this cocktail hour I would have been happy to proceed directly to the dessert table.

But after an hour of drinks and great food, we headed to yet another room where tables were set up for dinner. We were seated close to the music. The music these days is mostly deejays. All the music is in their computer and so they can please just about every musical taste. I do miss live bands though. They were often mediocre and wedding singers were hit and miss. But every once in a while you got a great band, and that’s when you really appreciated live music. No matter how loud the deejay makes his music, it doesn’t compare with a live guitar, drums or trumpet. I think the convenience of a deejay, and the vast variety of music they can play is helping them drive wedding bands out of business. Anyway, these days I’m stoked when I see that a wedding features a live band.

Despite all the changes in wedding culture over the years, most weddings I have been to recently still feature the obligatory dances with the bride’s father and the groom’s mother. And most also still have a ceremonial cutting of the wedding cake. Although the nonsense with the garter seems to have thankfully faded away.

The finale to a modern wedding is the Venetian Table, which usually features just about every dessert known to man. Here, again, we have stations like the chocolate station, the pastry station, the cake station and the ice cream station. As someone with a gigantic sweet tooth, I give the modern wedding dessert festival two sticky thumbs up. The dessert table brings the wedding festivities to a close for people my age, though younger guests dance until the deejay closes up shop.

We as a society devote a lot of time and money to weddings. In fact, it’s an industry unto itself. But at the end of it, what matters is whether the bride and groom are willing to work at being a team, respect each other and live together in harmony. Everyone who has been married knows how tough it can be at times, but if you work hard, with a little luck, you end up with a life partner. That reminds me of another song. If memory serves me it was written by Carole King. It says, “I know that each of us is all alone in the end, but the trip still seems less dangerous when you’ve got a friend.” And that’s why we get married.

Let’s Do as the Danish Do: Raise Taxes for Free Health Care

31 Monday Mar 2014

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taxes 3

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

I filed my income taxes this week. I have always thought that the two most patriotic things that most Americans can do are vote and pay your taxes. These days, most Americans don’t vote, and the common wisdom for the past 40 years is that income taxes are too high. This, despite the fact that the richest Americans today pay less than half of what they paid in the 1950s. The ridiculously low income tax rates we have today account for the reason why our health care system is in a shambles.

As I edge my way ever closer to Medicare eligibility, I have to marvel at how dysfunctional America is when it comes to health care. The news from Washington is that 6 million people have signed up for Obamacare, while a new poll shows that 41% of Americans would like it to be repealed. After spending some time recently discussing health care with people in Denmark, I am convinced we are on the wrong track. And the tragedy is we could have avoided all this by simply phasing in Medicare for everyone over a 10-year period. But that might have required raising taxes.

Denmark, like most other developed nations, provides basic health care for free to everyone. It is paid for out of taxes. And if you want to see a Dane get agitated, mention income taxes. They pay roughly double what we pay. But ask them if it’s worth it and they will tell you that, by and large, it is. Oh sure, there are waiting lists for some elective surgery. But when a medical emergency hits, Danes know they don’t have to worry. It’s going to be paid for. They will not be bankrupted by a long hospital stay.

In fact, the only bad thing Danes seem to say about their health care system is that it’s too good. By that they mean it’s so good that people from poorer countries like Romania are flocking to Denmark to take advantage of Danish generosity. As I listened to some Danish women explain this to me, I immediately thought about the way some Americans talk about immigrants, particularly from Latin America, who come to the United States to collect welfare. The difference is that in the United States we have just about dismantled the welfare system, and people are falling through economic catastrophe without a safety net. And we have an army at our Southern border with orders to stop anyone who tries to cross without a visa.

Meanwhile, in Denmark, no matter how much they resent poor people coming to their country for the social benefits, they have not dismantled their social safety net. And because they are part of the European Community, they can’t legally stop the immigration. And some Danes actually see value for their country in allowing immigration. It provides talent and ambition that have always been the lifeblood of any progressive society. They see what America has done as akin to cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Obamacare will not solve America’s health care crisis because it starts from the wrong premise. It doubles down on the system we already have where insurance companies are given the role of health care gatekeeper. Capitalism is so out of control in this country that many Americans actually believe that it’s a good idea to have profit-making companies in a position to decide what medical test you can get. They complain bitterly about a government takeover of health care and actually prefer to have insurance companies in charge. Danes look at this and shake their heads. Why would anyone want a company that has an interest in allowing you as little health care as possible be in charge of health care, they asked me. These companies have a conflict of interest. Isn’t it better to have a neutral government official in that role?

I could not defend our system, except to say that it works very well for rich people. Those who can afford the best insurance here will get excellent health care – better than they would get in Denmark. But for the rest of us, the present system sucks, and Obamacare is not likely to make it much better.

After my conversations in Denmark, I am convinced that the only solution is higher taxes. That’s right, higher taxes. Americans have to get over the hysteria about taxes and see the long-term benefits of not having to worry about a tsunami of a co-pay that we all are one illness away from. And while we’re raising those taxes, let’s make state universities free for eligible students and liberate young people from a lifetime of debt. That’s another good idea we could borrow from Denmark.

The Draw of Art

24 Monday Mar 2014

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mirror

BY JULIE SEYLER

The best thing about art is discovery. Seeing an artist that I have never heard of interpreting their world is never uninteresting. I learn something new, experience something different, and connect a few more dots in the art-history timeline. This year I have seen three retrospectives devoted to singular artists that have been around for over forty years that I was clueless about.

In January, I caught the Isa Genzken show at MOMA. 2 figures ISAShe is from Germany, now about 65 years old. In her youth, she was married to the polymathic artist Gerhard Richter. Over the course of a 40-year career, she has explored photography, sculpture, painting and assemblage. From the sleek, refined and earthy totemic spears that open the show, to the untamed sculptures of passionate aliveness in concrete, steel and epoxy, to the final full-room installation that grapples with the madness and rage of 9/11, she is out there – fierce and fearless.

The show was rough and visceral and rageful and antic and visually mesmerizing.bonnet. Epoxy resin

In Naples, the repository of art dates back to the fourth century B.C. When I was there last month, I was consistentIy fascinated by the fine art in each museum and church we visited. But I also put the MADRE, the city’s modern art museum, on my must-do list.
madre
A show was up on an Italian artist named Vettor Pisani. He was born in Bari in 1934, and died in Rome in 2011. He assembled photographs and figures and furniture and channeled his observations, and emotions, through mannequins and silk screen prints and films. His art covered politics and gender and war and peace. Vettor Pisani

And two weeks ago, I caught a show at PS1 in Queens on an Austrian artist called Maria Lassnig. It focused on her self-portraits. She’s about 90 years old, and reminds me vaguely of Alice Neel. Not just because of her longevity on the scene, and her refusal to shrink from who she is at any stage of life and in any mood, but because every mark is purposefully made with an invitation to keep looking at the color and depth and length and strength of it. She paints only with naked spirit.

Small science fiction self portrait 1995

Each exhibition was unpredictable and challenging and mysterious and fun and both familiar and unfamiliar. They hit all the tangents, like the Mike Kelly exhibit at PS1.

As it is said, “the more you see, the more you see.”

I’m a Stage 4. I’m Santa Claus

18 Tuesday Mar 2014

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santa

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

If you’re like me, you receive a ton of junk email every day. A lot of it still comes via U.S. mail. Most of it now comes via e-mail. While it’s rare to receive a harmful junk mail from your mail carrier, our email is full of potential viruses and dangerous offers.

Many of us have friends who forward stuff they find interesting. One of those emails recently included the following:

THE FOUR STAGES OF LIFE:
1) You believe in Santa Claus.
2) You don’t believe in Santa Claus.
3) You are Santa Claus.
4) You look like Santa Claus.

I was struck with the profound truth of this. The very young are in Stage 1, and cross over to Stage 2 when they go to school and talk to the big kids (or their older brothers). You stay in Stage 2 until you have children, and then, suddenly, you cross over to Stage 3. And when you get to the right side of 50, the odds are you cross over to Stage 4. OK, only some of us make it to Stage 4, but put a white wig and beard on me, and I’m Santa.

All this is just another reminder of the journey we all make as we age. Looking back, it’s been an interesting trip, and I have enjoyed each of the four stages, but particularly the first and third. However, I wonder whether somewhere on the road ahead is a Stage 5, where due to senility, I return to Stage 1. That would really be the circle of life.

Hats are Off, and ‘Out’

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

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men in hats

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

There’s a line in the Stephen Sondheim song “The Ladies Who Lunch,” from “Company,” in which the character played in the original production by Elaine Stritch asks, “Does anyone still wear a hat?” That was in 1970. Now, more than 40 years later, those of us who remember them can still ask, “Does anyone still wear a hat?”

The answer is almost no one, male or female, wears a hat for fashion. The only time I see hats on women is when I pass near an African American church on Sundays. There are no hats on fashion runways; no hats on the red carpet at the Oscars. There are no hats in most churches.

Those of us over 50 know full well that it wasn’t always like this. Men and women used to wear hats. Just watch any movie made before 1960. Men wore hats to work. Men wore hats to the ballgame. And I’m not talking about baseball caps. They wore real hats, like fedoras and derbys and homburgs. In summer, they wore straw hats. My grandfathers wouldn’t think of going “out” without their hats.

pat in hatWomen’s hats were an entire industry. Women wore a different one with every outfit. If you wore a coat, you wore a hat. And it wasn’t just for well-off women. Even working women in the movies and television wore hats. Even hard-boiled dames in Raymond Chandler stories wore hats. Lois Lane picked up her hat every time she was leaving the Daily Planet building.

Head coverings were actually required in many Christian churches until the 1960s. I remember there was a nun at the front door of my church who used to pass out handkerchiefs and tissues to girls who forgot their hats. And of course, Easter bonnets were a real thing back then. Women wore elaborate hats to Easter services. And the hat was the chief attraction at the Easter Parade.

The women’s hat industry was so big that they had a special name for a person who designed, made, trimmed, or sold women’s hats. He or she was called a milliner. It’s a word that has disappeared from our world like cobbler and blacksmith.

If I had to speculate at the one event that helped to killed men’s hats, I’d say it was the appearance of President Kennedy at his inaugural in 1961 standing in sub-freezing cold without a hat. Apparently, he wanted to have photographs showing him hatless next to President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon, both of whom were wearing hats. That was supposed to show that he was a young man of great vigor. It sounds to me like something Vladimir Putin might do today.

Anyway, apparently hat sales plummeted after that as America bought the idea that hats were old-fashioned. And when soon afterward the Catholic Church dropped the requirement that women wear hats to church, the writing was on the wall for milliners.

Of course, hats have never gone away completely. Every so often some celebrity appears wearing a porkpie, a pillbox or a Panama hat. But the days of regular men and women wearing hats for fashion are probably over.

Today, hats are worn for utilitarian purposes — to keep our heads warm in winter and protect them from the sun in the summer. But although I hated as a boy when I had to wear a hat when I got dressed up for a special occasion, I did like looking at other people wearing them and I still do.

Does anyone still wear a hat? Well, now that I’m a grandfather, maybe I’ll start wearing a hat to look the part. I’ll bet I could rock a fedora.

The Smoke and Mirrors of ‘Beauty’

07 Friday Mar 2014

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Beauty in the mirror

Let’s put beauty in the eyes of the older.

BY LOIS DESOCIO

Recently, while sitting at a bar with a 62-year-old male friend, he looked at the ebullient, smooth-skinned, 20-something bartender, then looked at me, and said: “Ah, to be young and beautiful again, right?”

“Been there, done that,” I said. “If she’s lucky, she’ll be 59 some day.”

While I don’t see myself as falling victim to the coveting of youth, and I’ve held on to my wrinkles (for now), I was never a Hollywood sexpot. And I’m not 81. Like Kim Novak.

That collective consciousness that judges women by how they look, was shoved, at Ms. Novak’s expense, in the faces of anyone who watched the Academy Awards last week, and was privy to the subsequent chatter, tweets, blogs, and mean-girl bashing about the pillowed lips, the skin-tight cheeks, and the raised eyebrows of Ms. Novak.

While I admit to having been taken aback at first by her looks, the irony and the hypocrisy of my reaction quickly took center stage. What happened to what we all know, and learned in kindergarten – don’t judge a book by its cover?

And don’t assume Ms. Novak sees herself as so many others did – the aging screen siren, who can’t face the truth, or much less a mirror, so she, out of desperation to stay young and beautiful, altered her face ineffably.

I applaud her, and I choose to believe she feels good about how she looks. She felt confident enough to face a Hollywood audience mostly half her age, and less.

Let’s add women who choose to take advantage of the latest dermatological advances to the list of the non-judged – to the list of those who know that aging gracefully is not about how others perceive you, or how much you choose to nip, tuck, pull, plump, lift, or allow to sag, but how you feel about yourself, and how you are allowed to take steps to maintain that credo in whatever way you choose.

A little pearl of prudence did roll out from under all this fray in the form of 31-year-old Lupita Nyong’o, and her speech at a Black Women in Hollywood luncheon days before the awards. It centered around her wish, when she was a young girl to “wake up lighter skinned,” and how it took “validation” from “a celebrated model …” to pull herself up and out of that … seduction of inadequacy.”

“…she was dark as night,” Ms. Nyong’o said. “I couldn’t believe that people were embracing a woman that looked so much like me as beautiful. Now I had a spring in my step because I felt more seen, more appreciated by the far-away gatekeepers of beauty.”

While Ms. Nyong’o’s words are a wretched, and disgraceful, reminder that even a by-any-standards-breathtakingly-beautiful (inside and out, it appears) young woman can fall victim to the societal “rules” of beauty, it also highlights her emergence away from that, and a grasping of the wisdom that, simply, beauty really does come from within.

This conversation is nothing new. But I’m hoping that the timing of Ms. Novak’s public thrashing, which came on the heels of Ms. Nyong’o’s personal confession, will at least nudge this next generation of women to kick that societal pendulum, which has been frozen closer to “you’re inadequate,” towards “everyone is beautiful.”

And I hope I’m lucky enough to be 80 someday.