Is Plastic Surgery a Sin? (Re: My Vogue article)

The April issue of Vogue is out with my article on page 112 under the title “A Facelift Revisited”. There is a cover line that reads: “My Three Facelifts A 20-year Nip & Tuck Diary”.

That cover line really gave me a start when I saw it, because I have had two facelifts, not three – one when I was 51 years old —18 years ago -- another ten years later when I was 61. Last year, when I was 68, I had a third procedure that was NOT surgery but Fraxel - fractional laser re-surfacing-- using the new CO2-powered laser called Fraxel Re:pair.

If you want to find out how that worked, and how long the facelifts lasted, and if it hurt (which is the first question everyone asks) you’ll have to buy the magazine.

I’m expecting that this article will lose me some friends and will also label me as the poster child for plastic surgery. As I’ve already remarked to some, I suspect that the words “three face lifts” will appear on my gravestone (although, like I said, I’ve only had TWO.) In my defense, I am not Heidi Montag, a 23-year-old actress who made the cover of People because she decided to have ten surgical procedures in one day to improve what was already an excellent face and body.

Above are the medical photos (sans makeup) taken by Dr. Dan Baker back in 1992, before and after my first face lift. I was 51 and, as I think you’ll agree, looked considerably older than my real age in the “before” picture. The “after” photo looks quite a bit better. My goal in having that face lift was to stave off the jowls which I was certain were my inheritance from my father (while my mother never drooped or sagged or looked less than stunning until she died at age 74.)

Dr. Baker said the face lift would last about ten years and he was right. So I had another one, with a Boston surgeon, a decade later when I was 61. I was less pleased with the results, as I explain in the article. There were scars left on my eyelids and pull marks on the side of my cheek and, as I passed age 65, brown patches appeared on my jaw line. So I was in the market for some solution – although I didn’t want another surgery — when I learned about the new kind of laser and decided to try it and write about it for Vogue – to help off-set the cost, because by age 68, I had a lot less discretionary cash to pay for it than I did at the age of 51.

My New York friends (I lived there for 14 years) are okay with the idea of plastic surgery —many have had some experience with it—but not so my friends in Massachusetts. I belong to a woman’s group that meets in the Worcester area about once a month, and as soon as the rumor came up that I would do this article, about a year and a half ago, my closest friend in the group told me I should not even consider it. “All your sisters are opposed to you doing this, Joan!” she scolded me.

“All of them?” I asked in surprise, because I knew one or two had already opted for plastic surgery.

“Every single one!” my friend whispered, in a voice heavy with warning.

Well, I never considered rejecting the opportunity. I’ve been a journalist for nearly 50 years and have done a lot of strange things in the name of “research”. Also, I had been trying for several years to figure out a way that I could afford a “fix” for my brown patches, fine lines and those deepening parentheses on either side of the mouth.

Furthermore, I feel it’s my face and body, and now that I’m nearly 70, I can do what I want with it.

But that conversation did give me flashbacks to my high school days when my concern for the majority opinion of the other girls would have carried a lot more weight.

In high school, I was not pretty, athletic, nor self-confident. I did get high grades and academic awards. All these factors consigned me to the table in the cafeteria with the oddballs and outsiders, far from the table where the “Gang” held forth.

I’m still not pretty, athletic, etc. but somewhere around the age of 60 I decided I’d earned the right to do what I wanted without listening to the opinions of the “mean girls”. (This is one of the many good things about cronehood. As one former high school classmate remarked at our 50th high school reunion “Just by staying alive you level the playing field.”) Even in college I began to realize that there were places where good grades and talent did not make you a pariah. And life improved a lot.

So I’m not going to justify or explain to my women’s group the Vogue article and the laser re-surfacing procedure. And I do not feel plastic surgery is a sin.

(Although I was convinced, 19 years ago when I went to the hospital in New York for my first face lift that God was going to strike me dead as punishment for my vanity. He didn’t. But in the same hospital, in the years after my surgery, two or three women did die while undergoing elective face lifts. And one of them was Olivia Goldsmith, who wrote “The First Wife’s Club.” I heard that these tragic cases were mostly due to reactions to the general anesthesia. I think that’s better controlled now—and with laser resurfacing, there is no general anesthesia, just topical.)

Anyway, if I wanted to explain my latest round of plastic surgery to the women in my group, (which I won’t -- everyone is too polite to mention it) I would repeat something that I wrote in the Vogue article.

I am not undergoing “maintenance” on my appearance every decade or so with the purpose of looking younger than my real age. I have never lied about my age and everyone who reads Vogue or looks up my profile on Facebook knows that I was born on Feb. 4, 1941. Next year I hit the big seven- oh.

I do it for the same reason I try to exercise on the stationary bike an hour a day and go to Pilates twice a week – although I hate exercise.

As I said at the end of my Vogue piece:

This is an ongoing process, not meant to hide or deny my age, but to let me wear the years gracefully.
“You look good,” [Dr.] Baker told me as we said goodbye. “Fifteen years younger than your age.”
So that means I look….53. Or maybe, to paraphrase Gloria Steinem: In the twenty-first century, this is what 68 looks like.

What I Learned at My Reunion

I’m back from three days at my 50th high school reunion in Edina, Minnesota and it was amazingly fun and moving and left me very proud of my class—especially those who defied illness or injury to show up. Friday night was cocktails and catching up at the Westin Edina hotel, where, during a trivia game, we all showed an uncanny ability to remember the dumb lyrics to those silly rock 'n' roll records of the late fifties.

At first I walked into a room full of tall strangers silhouetted against the windows and recognized no one. (All the guys had white hair and almost none of the women did.) Then I was met with hugs and shouts, and people started to turn into their remembered selves. Someone quoted a friend who had just come from her fortieth reunion: “For the first fifteen minutes, I was depressed at seeing all these old people, and then for the next three days, I was 18 years old again.”

Saturday morning was a bus tour of Edina, which looks nothing at all like the village I remember, where we would play kick-the-can until after dark down by Minnehaha Creek while our parents, busy barbecuing in the backyard, had no idea where we were and what we were doing. Now it’s all very high-end malls and high-rise buildings. The bus took us into Minneapolis proper and we toured the amazing architecture of the Guthrie Theater. I realized that Minneapolis is a very culturally happening place.

At Saturday lunch I gathered with classmates who had also gone to Wooddale Grade School. As we chatted, I began to realize that the men in the group had somehow, over the years, become charming, witty, entertaining, introspective, intuitive, chivalrous and thoughtful. All weekend, to my astonishment, chairs were pulled out and doors were opened for the “weaker sex” and someone always offered to help me struggle into my winter coat. (We had snow and the weather was bitter. On Sunday I left before a storm dropped three more inches. This is Minnesota, folks. No wimpy winters!)

Later I remarked to my daughter that, on the whole, my male classmates were amazingly improved over the last fifty years, and she replied, “Of course they are! What’s worse than an 18-year-old boy?”

Saturday night was the big dinner and dance at the Interlachen Country Club. I got a chance to catch up with some friends who had stayed in touch, but found the noise level and crowding to be intimidating. I’m always a bit claustrophobic and it was such a big and animated group that the hubbub made it hard to carry on a conversation. But the next day at breakfast in the hotel, there was time for some good post-party gossip before heading for the airport.

I believe there were 330 in our original senior class. Now 39 are deceased (the photos above show the memorial photo exhibit from Saturday night.) How young we were in 1959!

When you’re 18 years old, anything seems possible. Maybe you’ll cure cancer or write a bestseller or become a star or make a million—if only you can get into the right college.

When you’re 68, you know how your life will turn out, and for so many, that fifty years after graduation brought loss and heartbreak, illness and disabilities, but almost every one of the 187 classmates who wrote their biographical page for our Reunion Book ended with the words “I have been truly blessed” or a similar sentiment.

When you’re 68 years old, you’ve gained a certain amount of wisdom just by traveling over the bumps in the road. Many of my classmates shared some in their reunion book pages. I wish I could compile “The Collected Wisdom of the Class of 1959” but instead, I’ll just quote three classmates—as it happens all three are women (and now crones, since we’re all over 60.)

One wrote: “A rich life is one made up of family, friends, faith and fun – the four F’s.”

Another quoted Addison’s definition of happiness: “Something to do…something to love…Something to hope for.”

And a third concluded her page saying, “It amazes me how level the playing field is now. The very fact that we have survived 50 years post-high school makes us equals.”

MY 50TH HIGH SCHOOL REUNION!

(The design above, for the reunion invitation, was created by classmate Cary Carson.)


Tomorrow (Friday, Oct. 9) I get on a plane to fly from Boston to Minneapolis to attend the 50-year reunion of my class of 1959 at Edina Morningside High School. This is scary and exciting, nerve-wracking and exhilarating. It’s an event that many of us have been planning for more than a year. I was privileged to be one of the editors collecting bios and photos from 187 of our nearly 300 classmates for the Reunion Book. (Forty classmates are deceased and 22 of them have memorial pages in the book.)

High school was definitely NOT the happiest time of my life. I longed to get away from Edina, Minnesota, where we all seemed so homogeneous and competitive. Immediately after graduation, I traveled with a group of students to Europe for most of the summer and fell in love with travel—even though it was the ultra-budget variety. (The first hotel in Germany was a barely converted stable that still smelled like horses.)

At the reunion, I hope I’ll recognize my fellow classmates. The super-conscientious organizers of the event have created name tags for us—presumably with our high school yearbook photos—for ease of identification, but of course I’m too vain to wear my glasses so I probably won’t be able to read them! And I’m notoriously bad with names—can hardly remember those of my own children.

But I know from collecting the photos and bios that many of us have not changed that much in looks, despite the half century that’s gone by. What surprised and delighted me was how we’ve all traveled in different directions and survived a stunning variety of challenges.

As teenagers we all seemed pretty much alike. As 68-year-olds, there are plenty of classmates who describe lives filled with grandchildren, of course, and golf, tennis and going south for the winter. But who knew there would be so many senior citizens riding motorcycles, flying their own planes, women racing ATVs and jumping horses, painting portraits and writing books and deep-sea diving?

Some classmates described living on a boat or isolated in a lighthouse, raising their own grandchildren, writing movie scripts or poetry, serving in the CIA, surviving cancer, leading congregations, missions, Bible study groups and pilgrimages. One man who lost a leg as a youth founded a company making prosthetic limbs. A woman has spent years working with rescue dog rehabilitation in the treatment of veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Another woman lived on a sailboat for 30 years, performs as a cabaret singer and has written books about a French poet and an Indian tribe in Panama.

Many of our classmates have suffered loss of a spouse through death or divorce and then found love late in life. And some are currently struggling with disability or disease, but still fighting to appear at this reunion.

In our adult lives, my generation has lived through the most momentous changes in history—the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, political assassinations, Viet Nam, equal rights for women and the technological revolution. We basically invented teenagers and rock ‘n’ roll. Now we’re working out new ways to cope with old age.

I expect to learn a lot of fascinating and illuminating stories over this coming weekend, and when I get back from Minnesota, I’ll share what I’ve learned. This isn’t going to be our grandparents’ Fiftieth Reunion!

Michelle Obama's Arms--Can a Crone Get Them?

Remember about thirty years ago when everyone wanted Farrah Fawcett’s hair? (R.I.P. Farrah.) Then about 15 years ago, it was Jennifer Anniston’s hair that everyone wanted. Around the millennium it was Angelina Jolie’s full lips, leading to a lot of ill-conceived lip-plumping inoculations. Now everyone wants Michelle Obama’s sculpted arms. (While some hyper-critical folks say she should hide those muscular arms—they aren’t lady-like. That’s ridiculous! It’s not as if she’s so ripped that the veins are popping our of her arms, the way they do on Madonna.)

Yesterday’s big news story was that Mrs. Obama’s personal trainer, Cornell McClellan, has revealed how she gets those arms. It seems that Michelle, like her husband, tends to get up about 5:30 in the morning for a grueling workout that ends with her “arm-shaping superset” of tricep pushdowns (that means pulling a straight metal bar down against the resistance of a pulley—on a machine) followed without resting by a set of hammer curls using dumbbells. Fifteen of each make a set, then do it all over again two more times.

Was it Oscar Wilde who said “Never wave good-bye after forty.”? He was right. There comes a time in nearly every woman’s life when she realizes that sleeveless dresses are no longer appropriate for her wardrobe because sleeves are necessary to hide whatever that is hanging down from her upper arms. (Evidently it’s called “Bat wings.” As in “Old Bat”, I presume.)

When I was in my 30’s, I wrote an article for Ladies Home Journal that involved interviewing the “Dancing Grannies.” These were a group of women--all over 55 years old and living in a retirement community in Arizona—who had formed a dance troupe similar to the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, and traveled around performing high kicks and other dance routines not usually considered appropriate for grandmothers. They looked great. One of the grannies, I remember, told me that her upper arms had started to look crepey, but she countered that by doing arm curls with weights as she sat watching television.

At 68, I’m 13 years past the minimum age to join the Dancing Grannies. (I wonder if they’re still around?) A year ago, when I started taking pilates classes, I was flat on the floor struggling through the push-ups that always end the session (as a novice I get to do them while braced on my knees, not on my toes) and I looked at my upper arms and sure enough—major creping. Crepe paper was smoother than the flesh of my upper arms. When did that happen, I wondered?

(And whatever happened to crepe paper, I also wondered. When I was small, my mother would sew Halloween costumes for me out of crepe paper every year.)

Today, I’m exactly one month away from going back to Minnesota for the 50th reunion of my high school graduating class of 1959 from Edina Morningside High School. This will probably require a cocktail dress for one of the nights. And a cocktail dress might reveal some things I’d rather keep hidden about my upper arms.

(Speaking of 50th high school reunions, yesterday at the supermarket I was paging through the latest National Enquirer, as is my wont, and there was a photo of actor Nick Nolte being pushed in a wheelchair through an airport and the caption said that he was headed for HIS 50th high school reunion. He looked gaunt and old. At least I can walk through the airport to get to mine, I thought, feeling thankful for that.)

So starting yesterday, because I do have five-pound hand weights—I’ve instituted an “arm sculpting” routine inspired by Michelle Obama. Of course I don’t have that handy machine with the metal bar that you push down, but I know a maneuver with the weights that’s supposed to exercise the right muscles. (Hold your arms straight over your head clutching the weights, hands facing. Then bend your elbows so that the weights drop behind your head, somewhere at the back of your neck. Then straighten up the arms again, weights reaching toward the ceiling. Repeat 15 times.) Then do 15 arm curls with the weights extended out to the sides.

We’ll see, if I do three sets of 15 each in the morning and again in the evening, perhaps the firmness and flopping of my upper arms will be improved by the time I go to the reunion on Oct. 9. I’ll let you know. Or maybe I can just find a cocktail dress with nice long sleeves.