3. The Myth of the Invisible Middle-Aged Woman

3. The Myth of the Invisible Middle-Aged Woman

The following is a transcript of this episode. It has been edited for clarity.

Intro: Hey ladies, let me ask you something. Do you ever feel invisible? Like you’re being ignored, dismissed or overlooked? Well, tune in, because today’s episode is about the phenomenon I call the invisible middle aged woman. We’re going to talk about what we can do about our youth obsessed culture, and how we can stop perpetuating this myth that women over a certain age are no longer relevant. Welcome to More Beautiful, the podcast for women rewriting the midlife playbook. I’m Maryann LoRusso, and I invite you to join me and a guest each week, as we strive for a life that’s more adventurous, more fulfilling, and more beautiful than ever before.

Maryann: My guest today is my amazing friend Camela Zarcone. In a past life, Camela worked as an award winning newspaper reporter at a daily in New Hampshire, and wrote freelance pieces for the Boston Globe. These days, she works in Seattle as a cooking instructor, and writes a cooking with kids newsletter on substack called homeschool culinary arts. It’s so great to have you here, Camela. How are you?

Camela: Oh, I’m doing well, Marianne, and thank you so much. I’m really excited to be here, too.

Maryann: I’m so excited that you’re here. And I should mention that we worked together many, many years ago at a magazine in New York. And so I think we could talk about what it’s like being both young and older. As a working person.

Camela: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, cuz we certainly have both of those perspectives at this point. After many years

Maryann: We won’t say how many.

Camela: Exactly.

Maryann: But, as you guys might know, we’re going to be discussing today, this thing that I’ve been calling the invisible middle aged woman syndrome. I’d kind of describe it as this idea that women tend to be ignored as they grow older. And you know, it’s something I talk about a lot with friends. Friends have brought up the notion that they feel invisible in many situations, whether at work, on the dating front, walking down the street, what have you. Camela, have you ever felt that way?

Camela: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I guess I’ve had different types of invisibility that I’ve been encountering because certainly, as a mom of little kids, that was a different sort of invisibility. I mean, you know, I had this very important, very active role. But, you know, as a mom at home with little kids, there were times where I felt like I was completely unseen, and unheard. But now, you know, fast forward 20 years, and only my youngest is at home now. And he will be gone in a couple of years, before I know it. So now I’m starting to understand that it’s a different sort of invisibility that I’m going to be grappling with going forward, you know, this role as mom—this all, you know, all encompassing, all consuming role—has changed. And now, I don’t know what the next, you know, phase of my life looks like. On some concrete levels, I do, but there are these other more intangible, you know, qualities about it.

Maryann: But what you said about the baby stroller, you know, pushing a baby stroller or just having the young kids at home, I used to say that pushing around the stroller with the diaper bag, it kind of made you invisible, like all people could see was that woman with baby. And it’s like you didn’t exist.

Camela: And here’s a perfect—yeah. And I think a perfect example of that, too, is when you take your kids to the pediatricians office. They don’t even bother to look in the paperwork at what your name is, or even to ask you. You’re sitting right there. What did they do instead? They just addressed you as mom. And that used to drive me crazy. I used to think, whose mom? I am not your mom, I am his mom. Why can’t you even say my name? I mean, I’m a paying customer here in this doctor’s office. And you don’t even think I have a name or deserve a name. So yeah, for me, that was always a really galling example of that sort of mom invisibility. But yeah, going forward, what does this next, you know, phase look like? I guess that’s our $64,000 question.

Maryann: It really is. And there’s so many aspects to it. I mean, there’s the empty nest thing, it’s the emotional aspect of, you know, what, who am I now, it’s this identity crisis. But then, you know, what we’re talking about today is more like, how does the world see us? And why do you think that we don’t seem to have as much value in the eyes of our culture, of our society, after we’re a certain age? Is it all superficial? Is it something we put on ourselves, that’s in our heads? I mean, I hate to think so. But it sometimes feels that way.

Camela: Yeah. Or is it even some sort of anthropological relic? I mean I’m sure, you know, you’ve seen those charts about life expectancy, you know, over there. I just looked up a few of those numbers again, before we started to talk and, you know, 15,000 years ago, for example, life expectancy for humans was like, oh, 20 to 30 years. And think about how dramatically, I mean, even by, say, the 1600s, life expectancy had only jumped up to, you know, thirties. Thirties, or forties. So, in the past century, there’s been such a dramatic change, right, with all these advances in modern medicine. And so, in a sense, I feel like sometimes we are these beings who were only, you know, engineered to live until middle age, until we did our job of child rearing. And, you know, did our very early job of grandmothering in the forager community or the hunter gatherer society. So it is a very confusing question, I think. What does it look like, when you don’t live to just forty anymore?

M: Yeah, I mean, to think that society would dismiss us if we are now past our childbearing age.

C: Exactly. Yeah, like we’ve served our purpose.

M: Right, we’ve served our purpose, we’re not relevant to society anymore.

C: And it’s frustrating, because just as I wasn’t just, you know, mom in the doctor’s office, now that my kids are, you know, growing up and moving away, I’m still not just mom. But how to sort of take back that role for ourselves, I mean, I think that’s the compelling question.

M: Yeah. When women friends of mine complain about this, you know, and it runs the gamut of complaints that goes from, you know, well, “I was asked to step down from a social media role, because they want younger women to handle that” to “I was walking down the street, and the construction guys weren’t looking at me anymore”. To “I can’t get a drink at the bar” or whatever, it’s always these stories. But somehow it’s always this, like, man who’s to blame, I hear very often. And I’m not saying men are not to blame. But I’m also saying like, do we play any role? Because you can’t control other people’s behavior, but we can control our own behavior. Like, is there any part of us—and I was trying to think back to when we were in the 90s, working at our magazine, and there were some older women in the office, and were we dismissive of them? Were we thinking, oh, these chicks are, you know, they’re past their prime? And I think there is a little bit of that, if I’m going to be really honest.

C: Yeah. You know, I would certainly, you know, confess to some of that myself. When I was younger, I mean, I can remember thinking like, why would any woman in her right mind ever, ever drive a minivan? Why would… why? And I can remember, actually, I went with my then husband once and did a little test drive of a minivan. And I thought, never, never in a million years. It’s so big. It’s so clunky. It’s so not me, and in fact, the driver’s seat is so huge that it’s going to give my—I remember thinking this, this is terrible. I’m ashamed of this. But I remember thinking that that driver’s seat is so huge, it’s going to give my ass permission to spread out as I get older and older and older. So it’s dangerous for me to even consider having this minivan. And you know, we couldn’t afford it anyway, but I said to him after that little test drive, never. Never. I would never drive a minivan.

M: See I don’t know about you but I couldn’t wait to get rid of the minivan. After my youngest was a certain age I’m like, I’m going back to tiny cars. I hate minivans.

C: Yeah, did you? Oh, that’s great. So I think that’s a good example. I thought, oh, all these poor faceless women in their, you know, practical fleece clothing, driving their minivans—well, especially out here in the Pacific Northwest—driving in their fleece, in their minivan.

M: Is fleece the fabric of choice? The middle aged woman?

C: Yeah, well, some place like Seattle where it’s, you know, misty, it’s very practical.

M: Here too in San Francisco.

C: Yeah. So practical clothing, practical cars, because they’re just so tired that that’s you know, that’s all they can keep track of. Sure, I thought about stuff like that. But you’re right. I mean, there are times where I see people kind of—and I have for years, once I was part of that minivan scene, maybe not in one, but certainly, you know, on the periphery, let’s say—I did eventually get a station wagon, but…

M: You went really far into the realm.

C: But it had really good pickup so I could speak a little when my kids weren’t in the car. It was a good car.

M: I’m picturing Chevy Chase, in Vacation. You in the car like, “Let’s do it. Gotta get to Wally World.”

C: Turn back and see who’s in the back. No one, all right, I’m gunning this. But, yeah, so I do remember having those kinds of thoughts, and I cringe at it now. But I do think that, you know, not to excuse my sort of cavewoman way of thinking, if I can borrow that term after we talked about pre-history, but I think we have been conditioned. Every woman in our society has been conditioned, since we were little, to participate in that sort of thing. And it really takes a moment of awareness. You know, back when I was waiting tables, and I would see these miserable looking moms with these little kids throwing food at them at the table and stuff and think, oh, that’s exhausting. That looks terrible. Why would anyone do that? But, you know, I do feel like that’s how my brain has been wired by my upbringing, by the world around me.

M: But I mean, I also remember being a younger woman and saying, you know, being at a trade show, or some kind of work function and looking over and say, for example, seeing a table of older women in their 50s or whatever, and kind of like, if I’m gonna be completely honest thinking, wow, I’m not I’m at least I’m not there yet. Or feeling almost bad for them, like sorry for them that they’re still working their asses off, and they’re doing this and they’re, they’ve lost this some kind of a, you know, their edge or whatever. And now I look back and I’m like, I was a little shit. Like, I didn’t know anything, you know?

C: I know, I know.

M: I wish I could talk to my younger self and say, hey, ease up on these ladies. You’re gonna get there one day.

C: Absolutely. Or it makes me think of that, I forget the title of the book, but Nora Efron’s book a couple of years ago about… she was talking about how her neck had aged so much and that was a weird thing that she never saw coming. I mean, you know, on some level she did. But one day, she was thinking, oh my god, what happened to my neck? How did my neck age? And she was talking about wanting to say to younger women that they should definitely make sure that they wear bikinis while they can, because there will come a time when they will feel like they cannot.

M: But that’s the other thing too, we have to love each age we’re at. Because in five years, we’re going to look back on this age and say, damn, I should have just enjoyed that while I had it. I mean, every age is amazing, and it comes with certain, you know, perks and privileges and knowledge and experience.

C: Yeah, and wisdom. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, really a lot of freedom. Once that, you know, tremendous responsibility of twenty-five-hour-a-day parenting, it starts to, you know, lift, right, as your kids become more and more independent, and you don’t have to worry about them so much. You know, you go from bringing them home from the hospital thinking, how am I ever possibly going to keep this tiny human alive? Like, how can I even do that? And then there’s this arc that takes twenty years, where you finally know that they are going to keep themselves alive just fine. And then you think, wow, I have all this, you know, all this spare mental space now and all this time, and all this freedom. And hopefully, after, you know, years of working so hard and more resources to do that, so yeah, it’s exciting.

M: But, you know, even if we do have the opportunity, is there some validity to the notion that the world doesn’t see us anymore like they once did? And are we losing power in culture? Because I think that a little bit is on us too now, because we think that sometimes, because we fear going out into the world and doing something new. A lot of women I know say things like “I’m too old for that” or “how am I going to do that now? I’m the old lady” or “I have to hide my age, because if I say that I’m fifty-one, no one’s gonna hire me.” There’s a lot of that going on. There’s a lot of us feeding into it. And I feel somehow that if we could change that, we could change the whole culture. I mean, obviously it’s gonna take a while but you know, baby steps.

C: Yeah, absolutely. I think it really is time for us to find a way to reframe this as a very powerful time with tremendous potential and possibility, instead of saying, well, you know… just even the idea of the empty nest. People have certainly felt that, and one of my son’s started college this year… but just that idea that we think it should be such a time of mourning. You know, when it… of course we’re going to miss our child who’s gone away. But on the other hand, why is that sort of the go-to feeling or the expectation even, for every woman, I mean, so many people who don’t have kids my age, but are, you know, kind of my age or older—I have some neighbors who are older, who said, when they found out my son was going to college, “oh, you must be so unhappy and so sad”. And I wanted to say, actually, no, you know, I’ll miss him. But I’m actually really glad.

M: Right, god, you should hang out with my friends. Because last night, I was at a dinner party. And for the first thirty minutes, we all went around the table talking about the college drop off— my oldest just started at Berkeley, I still have a younger one at home—but they were, you know, going around the room and saying, you know, how was it? And people were talking about crying and feeling bad. And then the conversation shifted, and it was mostly the moms that were talking now and saying, but I have a spare bedroom. And I’m going to do this. And I’m going to do that. It was like a little bit of excitement. And you can tell they were all just a little bit hesitant to express that excitement, that they now had more time and space for themselves.

C: Exactly. Yeah, it’s almost like—you know, I don’t feel sheepish about it. But I do know some women who seem like they need to apologize for really being glad for moving into this new phase, which I think is a shame.

M: Yeah. But let’s go back to that notion of invisibility. So if you’re raring to go, you’ve got these ideas and visions, you want to do so much more, you know, your life is this blank page… How do you psych yourself up for it without, again, feeding into these ideas that you’re not going to be taken seriously, you’re not going to be valued?

C: I don’t know. I mean, that is a huge question for me. And I even think about, you know, really superficial things about, well…this is a really superficial example. But I think about, well, should I color my hair? Because then you know, it’s a little harder, at least now at this point in my life, it’s harder for people to kind of get a beat on my age if I keep coloring it. On the other hand, I don’t really want to color my hair. I don’t really give a shit if people know that I’m in my fifties. But then I think, no, people immediately think that, you know, they go right to that age business and that ageist business. I saw an article in The New York Times the other day where some woman director, movie director, was talking about how in her fifties, she had decided no more hair coloring. And this was somehow a great big deal. And she said, you know, men who are directors in their fifties, their sixties, their seventies—they don’t have to color their hair. Nobody cares. Nobody comments, if they don’t go trot off to get their roots done, you know, every X number of weeks. So she was wondering, you know, why is it such a big deal? I’m a film director. Why are we talking about my hair color?

M: Yeah, I just recorded a podcast with a hairdresser about that, about the gray hair thing. But again, I think it’s part of the whole idea that you have to cover up your age. Because if people know how old you are, they’re going to dismiss you. And I don’t know. I mean, I do feel like a little bit is changing. I was thinking before we got on this call today… I was thinking if I could figure out one example of a woman who kind of defies this, you know, a character and TV or movies or whatever that kind of, you know, is the opposite of being invisible. And I immediately thought of Cate Blanchett. Did you see Ocean’s Eight?

C: Oh yes, yes, that’s a great example.

M: Her character—I mean, she’s wearing leather. She’s on a motorcycle. She doesn’t even look like she’s having a midlife crisis, whatever that is. She’s got a business. She’s so self assured. She carries herself like a badass. I was thinking, I’m seeing more and more images of women like that. At this age. And I was trying to think why, and I think the answer is because more women are making these movies. More women are writing the books. More women are telling the stories. And they know that after forty, forty-five, there are still lots of stories we women have to tell. So maybe that’s the idea, the solution. As women actually are the creators, we’re going to see more, I don’t wanna say positive, but just more accurate depictions of midlife women.

C: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, we’ve been waiting forever to be the ones who get to frame the message. And I’m hopeful that, with things like this changing, that we will get to. But in the meantime, you’re right. It’s so frustrating and maddening.

M: I know, I just want to figure out how… I was talking to somebody about job interviewing, a friend of mine is looking for a job and she was on LinkedIn. And she told me about an algorithm, and LinkedIn, do not sue me if I got this wrong. But apparently, when someone is doing a search for a candidate, they can, you know, type in an age range and just knock you out from the start. Knock you out of the race.

C: I believe it. Yeah.

M: Yeah. So… and women are aware of this. And so they’re fudging their LinkedIn resume, or they’re omitting information. And I think that’s such a shame, because what happened to the idea of experience? Experience matters.

C: Exactly. And wisdom. Yeah. And being able to learn from mentors, instead of all competing to look the most vivacious and useful. Yeah, it’s maddening. I mean, I don’t have to deal with that sort of interviewing world right now because I’m, you know, I’m a gig worker, which has its own huge set of frustrations, right? But you know, I can’t imagine having to go face a job interview in an office right now. But I will say that I saw one depicted on that new Julie Delpy series that you and I were actually talking about a little bit the other day.

M: I watched a couple of episodes of it, yeah.

C: Yeah. And a woman who was fabulously qualified, she went on a job interview, and the woman interviewing her looked like she was about twenty-two. And this woman was in her forties. And was so dismissive and said something like, I just don’t think you’d be comfortable in this work environment, and… But, I did think this as I cringed through watching that scene, I thought, well, nobody ever even would have, you know, filmed a scene like this twenty years ago. So at least someone is pointing this sort of thing out, finally. I mean, this poor woman. And when she went home, she told her husband, the character told her husband she didn’t even go on the interview.

M: Right, because she was too ashamed to say it was an age thing. A similar storyline was on one of my favorites, it’s like a rom com, but it’s called the younger. Have you ever seen it?

C: No, I haven’t seen that one.

M: It’s finished now, I think it did six seasons. But the premise is this woman is recently divorced. She’s forty. And she’s going back to work as an editor after all these years staying home with her daughter. And same thing, you know, she’s at the job interview. She’s talking to two millennials who completely dismiss her and one of them starts to say, I think you are ol—and she starts to say old, too old. And the other chick corrects her and she says, you meant overqualified! You know? It’s the same scenario and she cannot get a job. So eventually, she lies about her age, and she’s passing as a twenty-seven year old, but gets a job.

C: Well, god love her because I could never pass as a twenty-seven year old! But that sounds like a little bit of Hollywood silliness right there. But why should that be the solution, too? Why shouldn’t everyone just deal with the fact that she’s not twenty-seven? But yeah, I can see, totally.

M: So one thing I wanted to mention… I don’t think people can afford to think of us as invisible anymore, because women over fifty now represent $15 trillion dollars in purchasing power.
So, really, we shouldn’t be ignored if we have that much power. I think marketers know it.

C: And we’re not shopping for minivans anymore. We’re shopping for all sorts of things. Yeah, of course.

M: What are you shopping for? Enquiring minds want to know.

C: Well, what am I shopping for now? Well, actually just boring things like cooking supplies for my classes. But no, I mean, of course, it’s not just those, you know, those products for the mom segment of society. It’s so many things because, you know, as we pursue all these different interests, and do all these great things, yeah, you’re right, we can’t be ignored. So even if we’re not gonna buy hair dye—hopefully—and minivans, there are all these other segments of the economy.

M: Motorcycle, leather jacket.

C: Yeah, exactly. Vespa! Yeah, the Vespas and GoGo boots.

M: I would love a Vespa. I would love one.

C: Yeah, I want to be recognized as a potential gogo boot and Vespa purchaser. No matter what my age.

M: That can be arranged. I think if someone meets you for just five minutes, they’ll know that you’re a Vespa purchaser.

C: Exactly. And maybe I need different GoGo boots for different Vespa days, I don’t know. I really want to explore this because…

M: Well I love going to Italy because every time—I’ve been there a few times— every time I go there’s always a woman around fifty, and she’s on a Vespa. But she’s also wearing four inch stilettos…

C: She needs the boots!

M: And she’s like, ciao! You know? Like she’s looking so hot, and I’m so jealous, you know? I wanna be that woman.

C: I know. Yeah. I mean, think about Sophia Loren around these days or someone like Isabel Laney. Totally, yeah. Well, we just need the right boots and the right Vespa.

M: When you find the boots, send me a pair.

C: Exactly.

M: So yeah, so I’m optimistic. I think… I really do think that as more women are in charge, I do think things are going to change—that idea that we’re no longer relevant. You know? And I also think it works both ways. We can’t just expect younger women to be like, “oh, they’re so great, they have experience!” until we act as mentors. ‘Cause I know when you and I were in the publishing business in the 90s and beyond, I didn’t have any mentors. Did you? I mean, did we have forty year old mentors?

C: Well, that’s interesting that you say that. I did have one really fantastic mentor, she was a professor of mine in journalism school. But you know what, wow, she was, you know, one in a million. She really, really struggled in the magazine world. Back then, in the 90s, she had been doing it then for—she was, and that’s another good example, she was in her forties. And I used to think, wow, she has just been struggling for so long and so hard in this industry. And even though she had worked in a lot of women’s publications, too, it just all still felt very controlled by men, and very much this male paradigm that she and other journalists her age had to negotiate. But yeah, she was, as I said, she was my only, you know, quote on quote, woman, journalist, mentor, then. And later, you know, I talked to other women who were from an older generation, and I met more of them—makes it sound like I’m meeting some exotic, you know, character—and they told similar stories too. Not about necessarily the magazine world in New York, but even in, you know, newspapers around the country. And it was just, it sounded awful. I mean, I don’t know… Well, I know how they did it, because they were incredibly strong women. But why do you necessarily have to be, you know, the strongest woman in the world, just to have a successful journalism career, to name that example?

M: Right. Well, it’s a very cutthroat industry obviously, we know that. But you’re right. I mean, but I do think the generation below us has a little bit more of this sisterhood than we did. Maybe that’s not true. But I kind of feel it from them, like, ever seen that—I keep bringing up pop culture here, but that show, The Bold Type, it’s about these girls who work at a magazine, a women’s magazine. And, you know, that’s the environment that we worked in. And theirs is so much different. They’ve got this editor-in-chief who is like the most kind, loving, supportive… like a mother figure to them. And I watched the show thinking, wow, like… like, I never had that at all.

C: Yeah, I did with that one woman, who was my mentor. But otherwise, I mean, that sounds… that scenario you’re describing sounds ludicrous to me, just based on what I have known.

M: But I guess what I’m saying is if we can be mentors to younger women and stop doing things like complaining about… like, I hear a lot of women complaining about younger women and saying how threatening it is that they’re taking over the workforce, apparently. You know, I think maybe we all just have to respect each other.

C: Yeah. And place some more emphasis on fostering community across these generations. Absolutely. I agree.

M: So moving away from the work front, many women I know say they feel overlooked in public and social settings as well, that having youthful good looks is somehow associated with respect and legitimacy and power. What do you think of that?

C: I think that’s absolutely the case. I mean, you know, I do feel like I’m sort of like, you know, just kind of fading away at some points when I walk down the street. And it’s such a switch from, you know, when we were younger. One thing that really comes to mind when I think about that is just the whole silly question of being carded when I go to buy a bottle of wine at the store. And I think… so I do this thing, when it happens—it almost never happens anymore, right? But I feel compelled to do this thing, to say to the cashier, to apologize in a way and say, oh, you know, what is this? Is this, like, be kind to old ladies day? I can’t believe you’re carding me. You know, things like that. And I think it’s such a switch from way back when I was underage, and I hated being carded for a whole different reason, because, well, you know, I had a very poor quality fake ID at that point.

M: So did we all.

C: I didn’t want to be carded. But now, it’s just so odd. This other thing I tend to do, too, when I get carded in the store… I like to tell the story of way back in when I was in college and waiting tables. And I would sometimes, I could spot just the right sort of table of very elderly women who would get a kick out of this. And so when I waited on them, if they ordered drinks, there would come this moment where I would say, “Very well, ladies, but I’m going to need to see some ID.” And they would laugh and laugh and laugh.

M: You made their day!

C: I know! It never failed to help with the tip. But I think wow, you know, how did I get to the point where I’m practically one of those little old ladies at the table who’s going to have some college student joking with her? So it just, it just blows my mind.

M: You’re talking about, you know, con—I was gonna say condensation, condensation! From younger women.

C: And now we’re doing a science podcast!

M: We are! I knew we’d cover a lot, but… oh, wow. I mean, you know, we joke about this, but there is some validity. I was actually doing a little research this morning, and I was reading about how most studies on women’s health focus on our reproductive age. And it literally stops, the studies stop, at women who are over the age of forty-nine. For instance, a few years ago, the demographic and health surveys program—which measures data for things like treating HIV, preventing domestic violence—was only looking at women between fifteen and forty-nine. Which is crazy, because in 2015, women over forty-nine accounted for nearly a quarter of the world’s population, so…

C: Yes, but Maryann, their uteruses didn’t work anymore, so they didn’t count!

M: I forgot. I almost forgot. My bad.

C: Isn’t it weird that when one part of your body is no longer working, then suddenly, you’re invisible? But now that’s, you know, literally the midpoint of many women’s lives. But that happens over and over and over in medical studies. For so long, just men were the subjects. And then you’re right, now this is supposed to be progress that just women under the age of 50, you know…It’s painful enough when you see in those studies where they break it down by ages—you know, they’re broken down in different ways—but it felt really bad to me when I started to be in age brackets that were like, 49 to 60 or something like that.

M: The beginning of a bracket is never fun.

C: I know, and I would think, wait, no! No, no. This is not my bracket. We need to tweak this bracket a little, because I’m not ready to go to the next bracket.

M: It’s funny you say that, because I remember planning a 40th birthday party. A group of friends and I were going to Vegas—which I will never do again—and I was trying to book some passes to a dance club. And I’m literally on the website and I’m using the pull-down menu to find our age group… I don’t know why I had to put our age-group in there, but there was nothing over, I think it was something like thirty-nine? There was no age bracket past thirty-nine.

C: That’s where the edge of the world is and you fall off. The edge of the earth. At age 39. No more dancing allowed.

M: Maybe we have fallen off and we’re in some alternative universe right now.

C: I don’t know. It makes me think, too, I was reading some… it was some retail story about clothing. Well, of course this was before the pandemic, back when people used to go to these places called “malls”. I don’t know if you remember those.

M: Vaguely.

C: But they did exist. I just felt so unwanted when I was reading this article. It was about a clothing store where, to make sure that women of a certain age—meaning, you know, the wrong, higher bracket—to keep out middle aged women, they had decided to play their music as loud as they could. And I had actually been wondering as I had walked around malls, like why, why does that store have that racket turned up all the way when I just wanna go in there and look for some clothes? But that was actually a deterrent for the likes of me, which seemed to be working. That, if you play your music loud enough, you will keep out the middle aged ladies.

M: And inversely, they keep the music loud but the lighting down. I was in a store the other day, and I couldn’t see how much something cost without my reading glasses. I’m looking at the tag like, “Why is it so damn dark in here?”

C: Well, you would just get escorted out! Well, the store detective, if you whipped out your reading glasses, would just take you by the arm and lead you right out, and come back in and say, we need to turn up that music even higher!

M: I know, this lady’s gotta go! This old broad needs to go.

C: She’s ruining our vibe in here.

M: She is. But you know, I have to say, Camela. aside from all this health stuff, which is really bad—it’s bad that we’re not being included in health studies, obviously, and it’s not so great to feel invisible—are there some upsides? Because I was thinking, I kind of like the fact that people aren’t judging me on my looks anymore. We’ve been arguing for years that we want to be taken seriously, we want to be known for what’s inside, not outside, so…I mean, in a way, is this good?

C: Oh, yeah. Absolutely, I think so too. I mean, we had talked a little bit about hair coloring at some point in the conversation, but I’m starting to think, well yeah, just let your hair go gray. No one will card you, there won’t be any of this, you know, moment of angst at the grocery store check-out line about “should I be carded? Shouldn’t I be? How do I feel about that?” No, no one’s gonna card me when I have completely gray hair. And it is nice to—well, except those food servers trying to, you know, flirt with the old ladies—but it would be nice to just be sort of left alone to do my own thing, to not care as much about all sorts of things in life and focus on what really is important to me. I mean, you know that whole cliche about how youth is wasted on the young? I do wish that way back in the day, that I had had a lot more sense and I hadn’t squandered so much of my youth in so many ways. But even without it, I do still now have a lot more wisdom. If I could’ve been fifty-year-old me navigating some of the harder times in my life, it would’ve been so much better. So I do feel like I have this toolkit now that I never possessed before, that has just come with experience. And yes, age. And yes, passing into bigger and higher brackets, I guess. And…

M: I totally agree. But, you know, now my brain is stuck on the fact that San Francisco is trying to remove tipping from all of its restaurants, and I’m thinking, oh, damn! No waiter’s gonna flirt with me anymore. So thanks for bringing that up!

C: Okay, so that’s one thing. One disappointment moving on in life, but think about all the other great things. You won’t care, though, because you’re gonna leave the restaurant and climb aboard your Vespa.

M: That’s right! Back to the Vespa, that’s right. Well, Camela, you are one woman who is never gonna be invisible, ‘cause you are a light. You really are. You’re amazing. Thank you so much for doing this today.

C: Well, thank you, Maryann. And it’s so great to talk to you, always. We’ve always had so much fun laughing together.

M: Always. I look forward to laughing with you even more when we’re eighty-five, ninety-five, you know?

C: Oh, absolutely.

M: Two crazy old broads sitting on our rocking chairs on someone’s porch.

C: No, on our Vespas! C’mon!

M: Oh, Vespa at 85? That’s pushing it, but you never know.

C: Well, yeah, who knows what kind of advances they’ll have in those Vespa engines by then? They’ll be really fast.

M: They’ll be self driving, of course.

C: That’s right, and we can just…Well, the Vespa goes through the Italian village square, right?

M: Yeah, but only if I can still wear my stilettos.

C: OK.

M: OK? Deal?

C: And you will be able to forever, I think.