Bald mama and her hot shoes...

I had no flipping idea how vain I was. I was always the person who was a bit of a tomboy… forgetting to shave my legs, going commando if there isn't clean underwear, or falling asleep in my clothes. I have been guilty of even going to the store the next morning in the same sweatpants. I never understood why sleeping in something makes you dirty. My bed is clean. I am showered. I simply had zero motivation to find anything else to wear. People find this strange and wrong. But something clicked when I turned fifty. Something new. I had a new run-in with that thing called vanity.

It was mid-century when my face, my body, my memory, my joints and the Sally I once knew was beginning to dissipate. There she goes. That girl (who she thought) was fat at 135 lbs; that youthful girl taken for granted. That cute girl with the pretty skin who used to think she was pathetically ugly. Somewhere around fifty; feeling strangely different looking but even so… much smarter. Smarter, wiser and more honest.

Blunt? Me? I'll take it.

I don’t particularly care to pretend to hide my opinions or be everything to everyone anymore. I swear like a trucker, and pee my pants when I sneeze. So do most middle-aged women but (for godsakes) why is everyone trying to lie and be so inhuman? Who cares about being this perfect specimen of womanhood? Why is everyone hiding? Are there days when my house is a mess? Oh please. If everyone would just be real, life would be so grand. I’ve given up on that one but have decided to be real at least to myself, and consequently real to all around me. I am just about the most spiritual person you will ever meet – and (yet) I still swear like a trucker.

Shit. Call the Moral Majority. Get a priest. There might be a raid.

I’ve never worn much makeup. Firstly I didn’t know how to make it look right and secondly I looked great without it, so it never occurred to me to try. Then there is fifty years-old. I should say fifty and the beginning of cancer. Unbeknownst to me the last ten years have been this big fight inside my body, but I didn’t relate to the rings under my eyes, the thickness in my waist or the swelling around my ankles. I figured fat, unhealthy people just get that way. But no amount of obsessive trips to the gym would have eliminated my cancer belly.

Calling Bobbi Brown and Laura Mercier and their team of experts.

So around five years ago, I started to experiment with taking ALL of my expertise as an artist into becoming a makeup aficionado. And that I did. I became transfixed with it. There is the outer-V and the inner corner, and the water-line. There is all new lingo. And then there was hair. Or lack thereof.

I’ve had Halle Berry hair before and so I wasn’t worried about being bald. I could get through this. Women are shoppers and we live for the hunt, so I would just shop it off. Truth is, when you can’t zip your pants, you find other things to hunt for. I am now an utter makeup geek at Sephora and a complete shoe whore at DSW. The amount of shoes I own embarrasses me. Poor Bruce is 5’6” (he insists on 5’7”) but (face it) I know the truth because my shoes make me tower over the man I (almost) looked up to. I cease to care about that around 1987 when I first became obsessed with heels. I am one of those stepsister type shoe people who will buy them when they don’t even fit. If they are hot shoes, it doesn’t matter. Hot is hot and if I want them, I buy them even if I tower over family members. Bruce doesn’t care at all anyway. He knows he is short and that I like platform shoes, so what’s the big whoop. Unfortunately, Sephora doesn’t make something to disguise my baldness. I would be fine as a bald woman. Right?

Wrong.

Bald is different. It is not short hair at all, it is the badge of sickness which, believe me, you don’t want. It isn’t attention I mind so much, but the pity. Oh, the pity. It isn’t even the staring or the pointing. It is the pity. It is also the advice. Everyone has a story or someone else they know who has gone through cancer. They tell you stories you don’t want to hear. They make you run from them as they get to the end of the story when their friend dies, and tells me how sad the funeral was. Or worse, they inform you of all of the horrible side effects the chemo gave this friend or that friend… knowing that (OMG) maybe my teeth will fall out too, or even get another cancer FROM the chemo itself, or heart attacks… the list is endless as is the insensitivity. I’m afraid to go out. I find myself imploding from the people around me and wanting solitude from the masses. Take me away from this madness.

“Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma is the cancer my cousin died from.” I would rather go to DSW and find myself some hot shoes to take my mind off it all. I am an 8 ½ medium, average to oily skin... and obsessed with buying more of it all even if the shoes don’t fit me and I already have the Grabber Lime green eye shadow..

Rocket Dogs. That’s right. Jimmy Choos, MAC Viva Glam lipstick and Rocket Dogs. Woof.