wrinkles – Shari Shattuck

Who wouldn't want this feeling and all the expression it brings?! — Who wouldn’t want this feeling and all the expression it brings?!

There are milestones in life that we look forward to. Mostly when we’re younger, of course. When you are five it feels like Christmas or your birthday will never come. You wonder in July if it’s too early to start the list for your Santa letter, and then comes the cruelty of December when gifts start to show up under the tree but you can’t open them yet! Then at fifteen it’s “Mom, mom, mom, MOM! When can I get my driver’s license?” (a word that is interchangeable with freedom at that age.) Then it’s can’t wait for 21 so I can legally drink a beer, which seems only fair, since you’ve been legally able to die for your country since you were 18. Of course, you can get yourself a fully automatic assault rifle and a grenade launcher before you go to kindergarten—”Go ‘Merica! We’re number one!” Why? “Because my toddler can open carry! I don’t got no college fund for him, but I got him this here arsenal! Feel the freedom!!” Of course that a slight exaggeration—key word, slight. (I’m from Georgia. Seen it, lived it, was horrified by it.)

But now, I have a really big milestone coming up. I mean, this is the queen mother of entitlement. In November I will be 55 years of age and I can order off the senior menu. The anticipation is exquisite. Hell, I even heard that Red Lobster will send a bus to pick me up. Bring on the cheese biscuits!

Sweet!! I will get discounts at so many places, and as a second plus, I can be crabby and bitch about the ‘good old days’ and nobody gets to tell me to buck up and get over it. Which is ironic, because I wouldn’t go backwards for all the wrinkle-free skin in California. That’s not so much of a sacrifice, since so much of that ‘younger looking skin’ was created by botulism poison or the surgeon’s knife, and I’m am not okay with that! No because I think it’s unnatural or any crap like that, but because I earned these wrinkles, and dammit, I’m keeping them! Why would I want to erase my smiles or my tears or my most fabulous adventures walking through rainstorms alone or sailing in a rough sea with my brother when we were teens. I’ll keep my moments, and if you think for one minute I care that someone says I look older, you’re right. It makes me happy!!

What a relief growing older has been really. I get to be friends with women without them feeling they have to resent or compete with me, or vice-versa. Men believe that I’m intelligent without that pathetically ignorant look of surprise on their face when I use big words and know what they mean, (and they often don’t.)

At one of my last doctor’s visit, I told my physician, who has known me for many years socially as well as a doctor, that I thought I was having memory loss because sometimes I occasionally couldn’t think of the right word. He laughed, really loud, and then said, “No, I think that’s just you trying to find the perfect word. Big difference.” Bastard wouldn’t even give me an out.

My husband thinks I need a hearing aid, but I’m too smart to tell him he mumbles sometimes. (In my experience, which is vast because, as previously stated, I’m old, it’s easier not to contradict your mate unless it’s life-threatening.) Oh, and please don’t try to tell me some crucial piece of information from your desk in the library while I’m standing at the sink in the kitchen with the water and the dishwasher running simultaneously. I may have lost some hearing range, but I prefer to think of it as hearing selectively. Another benefit to aging. You can pretend the people at the table next to you did not just say something that stupid.

Because my life long impulse has been to correct people, to call them on their bs. I’m still that way when I feel people are being cruel or unfair, I’m not afraid of a fight. If there’s one thing I have learned it’s that some people never do. To me, learning is everything. It’s the point. You can’t ever know everything. But if you keep listening and reading and learning, then knowledge of life and love is the penultimate experience. (That means next to last. Last of course, is death and what comes after, we don’t get to know that until the train leaves the station.)

As always, it comes to choices. I still love the Christmas season, which I define as whatever you choose to celebrate, religion, mythology, philosophy, the seasons, nature, etc. but it’s about the giving now. My favorite part is making Advent calendars for my nieces and nephews. I wrap 24 tiny presents for each of them and number them with the days. They’ve been such a big success that even at 17 and 18, they still enjoy them. Look under (“How to be the favorite Aunt” in my archives for tips.)

I love my birthday because it’s in fall, my favorite season, and because I went into labor with my second child on that day and her birthday is the next day. In truth, I feel guilty about my birthday because people always feel like they should do something for you. I think they should do something for my mom, she’s the one who did all the work! So I send her flowers or call her to wish her happy ‘birth’ day. As a milestone, birthdays don’t count as much to me. But this one…55!

So psyched! I’ll even get 30 percent off on Tuesdays at my favorite thrift store.

I’ll just have to wait for, let’s see, seven Tuesdays. It would be six, but my birthday is on a Wednesday this year.

Come on 55! I feel like a kid again.

Shari, Oct. 8th, 2015

This is one of my favorite quotations. As far as I know the author is anonymous, and this poem is inscribed on the base of a sun dial at a University.

The shadow by my finger cast
Divides the future from the past:
Before it, sleeps the unborn hour,
In darkness, and beyond thy power.
Behind its unreturning line,
The vanished hour, no longer thine:
One hour alone is in thy hands,-
The NOW on which the shadow stands.

The reason I’m sharing this today is that I’ve had a sort of time warp jump illustrated to me in my life, perhaps in a way, a very external one, that few people will experience.

It’s been over ten years since I’ve done a film or TV. I have no regrets. I’m so glad I took the time to be with my girls, and there’s no question that the theatre I did in that time has made me twice the actress I was before, but what an interesting thing to see myself on film again with a decade jump.

Now, forty to fifty is a big leap, and Scream at the Devil is far from a Vanity piece. You don’t play a woman tortured by schizophrenia with full make up and fake eyelashes. Not if you want any kind of reality, and I certainly did. Actually, I’m fifty-two now, so call it a dozen years. And I look different. I’m in good shape, but I have cellulite, and a few more pounds. I have the same cheekbones, but the skin is a big looser around my mouth. My eyes crinkle when I smile, and let’s face it, extreme emotion is seldom physically flattering.

And I’m all right with that. Of course, editing is a strange process, you can, and often have to, change the tempo of scenes, choose shots that make the scene work or fit into the other actor’s improvised lines, it’s not anything like choosing the best still photos from your vacation or head shot shoot. What I’m hoping for here is a performance that moves those who see it, and that honors the suffering of those affected by crushing mental illness and chemical imbalance.

I know, though I don’t care all that much, that people will judge my appearance in this film, and compare it to my much younger self. Why? I don’t know. I suppose as actors and performers and even as a people, we have allowed judgement of physicality and age to so infect our perceptions that even the judged have bought into it.

Big mistake. And here’s why. I don’t care how young you are, how beautiful, how sexy, or how much you place your self-value in those traits, you will age. And I wish for you the same joy in it that I have found.

I’ve never been happier, or felt more beautiful. It makes me so sad when I see women who are in their fifties still trying to sell themselves as ‘sexy.’ Not that they aren’t, of course, they are, but it’s a different sexy, it’s a confident, feeling sexual and contented on the inside instead of counting on others feeling that you are what you want to be.

Does that make sense? Once when I was in an intensive scene study class, a very attractive blonde young actress was struggling to do a scene from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and the coach was trying to get her to embrace Maggie’s sultry, seething sexuality, but she just coudn’t. Finally I said, “I can help her!”

David, the coach, looked at me and said, “Fine, Shari Shattuck wants to tell someone how to play sexy. Please, yes, be my guest.”

Instead of speaking up in front of everyone, I left my seat, went down to the stage and whispered in her ear, “It’s not about ‘acting’ sexy, it’s about feeling turned on, feeling sexual.”

She nodded, started the scene again and virtually slithered over furniture and the actor playing Brick like a cat in heat.

David turned to me and said, “What the f*ck did you say?”

I just winked at the actress and said, “It’s a secret.”

But it’s not, or it shouldn’t be. Ladies, gentlemen, embrace your age, be the best you can be, and smile at the fact that the twenty-somethings will get more attention than you. That’s okay, it’s a relief really, to stop being thrown into the arena of physical competition. Don’t let anyone do that to you anymore, and don’t, please, I’m begging you, do it to yourself.

I’m very excited about my life now. I’m calmer and happier, and more fulfilled and focused than ever before. I have as much, maybe more energy than I did in my twenties, I am so much better at dividing my time and knowing what I want and who I want to spend my time with. What a gift!

Take that gift, reach out and grab it. Unwrap it and smile and rejoice. The gift of now, the culmination of all your work, realizations, epiphanies, emotional growth, and wisdom.

Who could ask for anything more?

With love and contentment,

Shari. June 30th, 2013.

Tag: wrinkles

My Happy Wrinkles.

The Now on which the Shadow Stands.