I’m turning a milestone birthday tomorrow, and I’m about to do something that requires some courage: attempt to say it out loud where everyone can see it. Saying this number where people who don’t already know me and love me can hear it takes the same kind of bravery as Iggy Pop taking the stage shirtless at whatever age he is. You’re not sure it’s a good idea, but you respect the hell out of the commitment.
Almost nobody in the world outside of family and closest friends knows, and I’ve liked it that way. It’s really not about vanity, but more because the second people know the number, they start looking for the person who’s supposed to come with it. Older, slower, softer, done. That’s not who shows up when I walk into a room, and I have spent five decades making sure of it.
The part that messes with me is that nothing has changed. I still blast rock music loud enough to rattle the windows of my car. My hair is still long. I still dress like I’m on my way to a show, and some days I am. On other days, the show is my classroom, but I treat it the same. My students deserve someone with new and fresh ideas, who looks alive, who wears clothes that make them think, who is this person? There’s no montage, no slow fade, no moment where I traded the leather and Betsey Johnson leopard jackets for something sensible. I am the same person I was at 29.
Sixty-nine was a punchline I got to make for an entire year, and it felt like I was getting away with something. I was sixty nine and fine, and for the record, I still am.
Until tomorrow.
I look in the mirror most mornings and unless my eyes are malfunctioning, the woman looking back doesn’t match the number on the calendar. And what’s strange is that I kind of like what I see. Some mornings I look like a cross between Courtney Love on her worst, most beautiful bender, and if I’ve slept well, Michelle Pfeiffer. At least that’s who my husband tells me I look like before he puts his glasses on. Talk about denial. Two people with a shared delusion strong enough to hold up a house.
When the panic creeps in as it always does, I do what I’ve always done: I go looking for proof of life. I scroll through pictures of the women I’ve modeled myself after since I was a teenager with a bad fake ID, badasses like Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, Stevie Nicks, Cher, Chaka Kahn, Madonna. You know, the ones out there refusing to act their age, whatever the fuck that means. Betsey Johnson at eighty four still wears her Raggedy Ann style hair and is doing splits at her own fashion shows, for fuck’s sake. Kim Cattrall’s perfect sixty nine fine ass could stop a subway train.
Every day, I pull on my jeans or tulle skirts, pair it with one of my T-shirts, throw on one of my many pairs of boots, style my blonde, shagged hair, and slide through the world incognito. And then I practice someone asking how old I am and I try to say it out loud but the number comes out of my mouth like a fish bone stuck in my esophagus. Excuse me while I choke.
I teach college, and my students tell me I’m a cool professor, which is a sentence I never in a million years pictured myself saying and which I now recognize as something Amy Poehler’s character June George says in that scene where the mom is trying way too hard to be one of the girls. I’m aware of how this sounds but I’m saying it anyway. I can hear Curt Cobain screaming “a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial.”
I have built an entire personality out of not acting my age, and this is the first time that personality has ever been asked to prove it under oath. Decades of refusing the dress code, refusing the “wine is bad for you” advice, refusing to turn the volume down, refusing to dim myself, and it’s currently failing against a calendar. You cannot talk your way out of a birthday. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve got decades of practice arguing with authority, and the calendar does not negotiate.
So why is this the birthday that’s got its knee on my chest when the others didn’t?
It’s not that usual thick cloud of mortality that hovers over me, the one I’ve never made peace with. This is different. It’s less “I am going to die” and more “How the hell did this happen so quickly?”
My best friend of over fifty years shares these milestone birthdays with me. We’re fifteen days apart in age, which means we’ve been aging in lockstep like some kind of horrifying synchronized swim team since high school. Each decade’s “big one” gets a theme. Sixty was “Beach Bitches,” so we headed to Nobu in Malibu for sushi and sake, got drunk, and planned on getting matching tattoos. I came home with a cat instead.
Frankie, named after Ione Skye’s character in one of my favorite films, Dream for an Insomniac, is now old as fuck. She is aging in cat years which means she walks around at night confused and howling, and in the morning, jumps on my chest and belts out a sound that can only be described as a bitchy, cranky meow. My only response to this poor aging white furry thing who can no longer jump on the bed without digging her claws into the sheets to hold on for dear life, is, “I feel you, girl.”
This year’s theme is “Rebels with a Cause.” We plan on getting actual tattoos this time, a bungee jump exercise class, steak, martinis, and a very healthy serving of denial on the side. Or maybe this time I’ll come home with an iguana and name her Samantha Jones.
When the self-pity starts creeping in, I think about my queen, Joni Mitchell.
Joni doesn’t give a single fuck about her age. She cares about her art and her music. I spent most of my career surrounded by 80s hair bands, not singer-songwriters like her, but the business is small, and these connections got me access to people like her, which is how I ended up, decades ago, sitting in a radio station studio while she performed live for an audience of three: me, my sister, and the airwaves. No crowd, just Joni Mitchell and an ashtray filled with her cigarette butts, six feet away, singing like she had something to prove to nobody but herself.
At 71, she wasn’t worried about her age. She was surviving a brain aneurysm that took away her ability to walk and play guitar, and she clawed her way back through sheer stubborn will. Ironically, I ran into her on my 67th birthday at a restaurant in Beverly Hills and I told her how happy I was to see her looking so great and that I was so relieved she’d pulled through. Joni, almost 80, took my hand, looked me dead in the eyes, and told me we were a couple of tough women who weren’t going anywhere.
If Joni believes that, I have to believe it too.
Something that has changed in the last decade is the meaning of songs. I put on Joni’s Both Sides Now, the version she recorded decades after the first, her voice sanded down by time and cigarettes, and it takes the legs out from under me. Landslide does the same thing. These used to be songs about growing up. Now they’re songs about having grown up, which is a different kind of gut-punch.
Instead of marinating in self-pity, I'm choosing to revel in the advantage of having spent a large part of my career inside the music business rather than outside it. I skated at a rock and roll skating rink where David Lee Roth pressed a matchbook into my hand with a note and an open invitation to his house afterward. (I went, and ended up in the hospital after falling into a nest of brown recluse spiders). I sat on a piano bench at a friend’s house next to Brian Wilson while he played Christmas carols. I have more backstage passes stashed in drawers than I have underwear, actual laminates, actual stories, decades of them, so many that I’m presently writing a book with my sister because one story could never tell all of it.
And it's not just backstage access. I was in the crowd, too, for shows I'll never stop bragging about. I saw David Bowie lowered onto the stage in an actual space capsule on the Diamond Dogs tour, descending on us like some kind of alien landlord. I stood close enough to Led Zeppelin to watch Robert Plant sing about squeezing his lemon until the juice ran down his leg and women around me throwing their underwear onto the stage. I watched a young Prince open for the Rolling Stones in a corset and high heels and get booed off the stage by a hostile crowd that had no idea what they were looking at. As for Joni, I've watched her from the front row more times than I can count, and had actual conversations with her, not just handshakes and photos. If the price of that access is turning this age, I'd pay it again tomorrow.
I guess the main point is that I'm still here. I've spent my life as a devoted, borderline reckless sun worshipper who used to joke that I’d rather end up a leathery old chick who actually lived than a preserved one who didn't. So maybe it's time to dig out the new version of Bain de Soleil SPF #4, throw on a bikini, and get on a raft somewhere warm and float around with a prosecco in one hand and a piña colada in the other.
So on this birthday, I’m going back to my roots. Not the ones I dye blonde, but the ones the women who raised me on rock and roll planted decades ago: don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks.
Which brings me to the list. I've been a list maker my whole life, a person who needs things written down to feel like they're real, and somewhere along the way that turned into something closer to superstition: as long as I've got things left to check off, I'm not allowed to die yet. Not a Bucket List, because bucket lists are for people preparing to go. Mine is a Fuckit List: things I still intend to do, with not one more fuck to give.
Fuckit List
Buy an apartment in New York
Go back to Italy and see my family
Finish the book
Meet John Patrick Shanley
Meet with David Chase
Visit Spain, Portugal, and the South of France
Make Joni Mitchell dinner
Float on a raft in Sicily
Own a Fendi sequined baguette
Learn to swim beyond dog paddling
Speak Italian and fluent Spanish
Don’t die
Oh, and Happy Fucking Birthday to me. Forever sixty nine and fine.
Happy Birthday!! Love you!!