My Formerly Hot Life (5 page)

Talking to Rhonda about hanging with her younger friends made me realize I don’t have any non-Formerly friends. Everyone I come into meaningful contact with is a Formerly. Like living in a relatively homogeneous community in which everyone shares your religious or political outlook, it’s comfortable and easy to assume a certain foundation of understanding. So when I do on occasion have a real conversation with an adult in her, say, late 20s, everything goes along just fine until I say something that earns me a blank stare. That’s my signal that I used a catchphrase or made reference to something that is so anachronistic as to have moved beyond lame to completely irrelevant, thus highlighting the vast generational divide between us. It’s worse if you try to explain yourself. Once I found myself singing the Enjoli perfume song (“‘I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan …’ I’m sure it’s on YouTube!”) to a tableful of dumbstruck hipsters who so wished I’d stop. I really wanted to. I just couldn’t.

To be sure, Rhonda sometimes feels a bit out of sync with her non-Formerly friends, but she loves that they’ve actually heard Lady Gaga’s music, not just her name. “Sometimes I
look around and am one of the older people in the bar,” says Rhonda, who is 42. “How I feel about it depends on my mood.” Sometimes she’s a bit wistful; Rhonda watches the ritual hair tosses and wingman maneuvers and cock blocks and women pretending to receive texts from boyfriends waiting at home who don’t exist. “Once in a while I wish I could have those moments and chances again,” she says, experiencing them for the first time as a young person. On the other hand, she has the wisdom and experience to know that she doesn’t have to put up with the insecurity and will-he-call awfulness of dating in your 20s. “Sometimes it’s like,
Thank God I don’t have to endure this just because everyone expects me to. If I’m not having fun, I can just go home!
”

Right. Would it have killed someone to tell me that I was free to go home at any time, back when I was in my 20s? Then again, I should have been able to figure it out. I was a smart young woman with two feet and subway fare. Why did I think there was some rule that said I had to stay until the last loser had fallen off the bar stool, because that’s what I was “supposed” to be doing at my age? I can remember feeling bored and annoyed at so many parties, but laughing a little too loudly and pretending to have “the BEST time!” afraid to leave because I thought I’d miss something. This was my youth! What if “the time of my life” took place right after I left? I felt like all my friends were in on some big joke or vital nugget of information that gave them the appropriate amount of youthful insouciance, while I was, as often as not, worried that my shoes were wrong.

I am so happy to have that little bit of Formerly wisdom. We
can
go home. We don’t have to be friends with toxic, draining people to learn that you don’t have to be friends with toxic draining people! If you do that once, it’s enough. It’s not that different the second time. A Formerly is not friends with someone because your mom went to college with her mom or because you want some of her charisma or popularity to rub off on you or because you can’t bear to be alone. What a gigantic relief! When you’re younger, “You feel so alienated, you try so hard to fit into a group,” says Rhonda. “Now my friendships give me community, but I don’t need them to give me my identity.” Amen to that, sister.

The other big thing about friendships as a Formerly is that we’ve had decades to accumulate a vast army of friends, some old, some new. I was in the Brownies when I was a kid, and they taught us to sing that adage “Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver and the other’s gold” in a round. One group of girls started the song, and each subsequent group began the verse just after the previous group had finished singing the word “friends.” We were told to enunciate the first word, so the song always sounded to me like “MAKE new friends, MAKE new friends, MAKE new friends …” and the whole part about keeping old friends because they were so valuable got drowned out. It was also unclear when, if ever, you were supposed to stop singing. It was like a perpetual loop of a single mantra—MAKE new friends—and could cause a little girl to lose her tiny mind
and just want to eat all the Girl Scout cookies she was supposed to be selling.

In any event, no thanks to that song, I’ve been very fortunate to have kept many of my oldest friends, probably because I’ve lived in one place most of my life, a place (New York City) where people don’t automatically flee as soon as they get their driver’s licenses. (This may be because many never get their driver’s licenses, but that’s another subject entirely.) I know it’s rare to have so many childhood friends, because my newer friends often marvel at my vintage friendships.

But because I have such a crop of old and relatively new friends, I’ve got some perspective on why they’re both important. Gold and silver is way too facile a way of viewing their absolute and relative value.

Old friends, on the one hand, are the keepers of your context. They knew you when you were your Formerly—whether you were Formerly Hot, Formerly Wild, Formerly Arrogant, Formerly Fat or Formerly Cripplingly Shy but nonetheless the girl who would take down a no-neck fraternity bully with one cutting phrase if you had to. No matter what you become, they get it, they get you and they get how you arrived at now. What’s more, if you stray too far from what you were, in a bad way—say, you’re Patrick Dempsey, all sexy and sensitive as McDreamy on
Gray’s Anatomy
—and you get a swelled head, you need an old friend around to remind you that in 1986, you once considered yourself lucky to star in
Meatballs III
.

Then again, if your Formerly wasn’t something you were entirely proud of, new friends can be a fresh start. They don’t know you as Formerly Slutty, that girl who slept with half the guys in her freshman dorm, or Formerly the Prodigy, the one who everyone thought would be the first woman President but who now works in a yarn store (So the eff what? You love to knit!). They see who you are now, and like what they see, and don’t have lingering judgments.

Of course, newer friends can’t see patterns, a perspective that as a Formerly I need more than ever. With so little spare time, I find myself ever more frustrated when I make the same dumb-ass mistakes I’ve made for years, or get all twisted up over the things in life that will probably never change and are just not worth the angst. It’s good to have a friend who has been around long enough to say, “And you’re
surprised
that your stepmother wants you to fly across the country with your toddler and infant at great expense and sleep in a motel over a holiday weekend when it would be much easier for she and your dad to come to you? Why? Because she’s always been so accommodating? Remember the time when …” It is so validating and makes you feel ever so much less like a crazy lady. And if a new friend steps in with a fresh way to talk to the difficult stepmother (since muttering “I hate you!” under your breath since you were 16 hasn’t worked), all the better. New friends let you make new patterns—they let you see that if you act differently, maybe you’ll get different results.

Either way, you’ve got two great girls to go out to a bar with once in a while. You can order a silly-sounding drink, blow off some steam for as long as you can keep your eyes open and remember you’re not old. That is, if you can ever find a date to meet up that works for all three of you.

A
Formerly needs more than jeans in her closet, of course, but figuring out what works now that you’re in a new category of human can be tricky. So every time I go shopping, online or in person, I bring along my personal stylist, Restraint. She sounds like a big old poop, but she’s not—in fact, she’ll take you clubbing, and you’ll have a rockin’ time, but the next day you won’t be nearly dead of a hangover and hallucinating that you did it with one of the Ramones.

Here’s an example of her type of thinking: Wear a mini-skirt if you want. But don’t wear it with fishnets
and
platform pumps
and
a bustier
and
an MC jacket. With black tights, a fitted blazer and flats, you’re good. Restraint says I can pretty much wear whatever I want, and no single item is off-limits. I just don’t want to look like I’m dressing up like a teenager for Halloween, and Restraint helps me make that determination. What’s more, too much of any single thing on your person at any given time—whether it’s leather, sequins,
Lily Pulitzer prints, self-tanner or Swarovski crystals—is no good. This is true for anyone of any age or life stage, but becomes even more important when you get to be a Formerly and can no longer wear wrist loads of bracelets
and
big hoop earrings
and
lots of rings without looking like a fortune-teller.

Restraint also guides me well when it comes to trends. She basically says to wink at a trend and maybe flirt a little, but no making out and certainly no full body contact. Whereas before, I might have embraced a trend—say, full-on vintage 1950s Doris Day—by donning a poofy, nip-waist cocktail dress, bright red lipstick, pointy pumps and a handbag made out of wicker, now I’ll stick with my own look and maybe wave hello to Doris across the party (I’ll get just the wicker handbag, or just the pumps, but not the whole getup).

I see a parallel between the way I conducted my romantic life pre-Formerly and the way I shopped then. When I was single (which was until I was 34 and was on the verge of Formerlydom), I felt if a guy was nice or smart or interesting or came highly recommended, I should at least give him a chance. I was looking for love, and I didn’t know enough about myself to be sure of exactly what I needed in a partner, so I tried a lot of guys on, as it were. Over time, through trial and error and making the same mistake 12 or 30 times, I figured out what I needed, what I wanted and what I could live with. I also knew what I couldn’t tolerate, under any circumstances. This narrowed my field and eventually I found
the “style” of guy that works for me. The one I eventually fell in love with and married fits in squarely with that style. Similarly, I tried a myriad of clothing styles and followed trends over the years until I developed a sense of what worked and what didn’t.

(I’m oversimplifying, of course. I dated the guy equivalent of blister-producing, toe-crushing pointy masochist stilettos way longer than was wise, and rolled my eyes at some well-made classics that I probably should have tried when I had the chance. But you get the idea.)

Knowing what works for you—in all aspects of your life, including relationships and fashion—is one of the fantastic things about being a Formerly. “You finally have some perspective on yourself,” says my friend Alex, a fashion writer and fabulous Formerly living in France (Paris, natch!). “You have seen yourself in photos for 20 years, with five or six different hair trends, living through the preppy era, the punk era, etc. In that time, you come to realize,
There’s a bigger me than all of these fleeting outfits and styles and moods and trends
. As you get older and become a Formerly, you have a sense of yourself as more permanent than any of those things. That makes you a bit less of a fashion victim.”

I totally agree. When I pick up
Elle
or
Vogue
, and am enlightened as to what’s “in,” it’s a variation on something I’ve seen, and likely worn before. I know whether or not it works for me.
Oh, look! Blue-and-white-striped shirts and wide-leg pants—they’re dusting off the nautical theme. I could never pull off that whole cute first-mate bit. Peasant dresses and gauzy blouses?
Right. Boho chic. That I can work with
. Shopping is a much calmer, less compulsive experience. “The big jeans that I wore in the ’90s with the paper-bag waist—they didn’t look good on me,” says Alex. “They’ve come back around again, like everything does. Sure, this time they are in a lighter fabric, with a higher waist, but it’s the same thing. I’m like, nope. I know not to mess with that, because I have some wisdom. All that other stuff, it’s fleeting.”