Annabelle Gurwitch to Make an Effort in Greenwich

For anyone who intends to turn 50 -- or for those who’ve already graced that threshold -- here’s a tip: on November 19, make an effort and come out to The Drawing Room in Cos Cob. That’s where Annabelle Gurwitch will regale the JCC Greenwich audience with her collection of personal stories, I See You Made an Effort : Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50. (Register here.)

The actress and author of You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up and co-host of the former show Dinner & a Movie will get your day started with some guaranteed laughs. Top of the agenda are the humiliations of growing older in America. She should know: she’s doing so in Hollywood.

From battling wrinkles (“I’ve had things injected in my face that I wouldn’t clean my house with”) to approaching “the Eileen Fisher years” (in “[s]waths of material gently cascading over the area where your waistline once was”), our intrepid author has all the essentials covered.

If Nora Ephron felt bad about her neck, Annabelle Gurwitch feels tragicomic from head to toe. You don’t have to be middle-aged to grasp what it’s like tottering at the AARP precipice (whose solicitations picturing pastel-swathed couples she says scream: “Here, take my libido and hold it for the rest of my life, which won’t last much longer anyway.”).

Some things aren’t so funny. Gurwitch talks about helping her mother through a mastectomy, making financial ends meet and the challenges of parenting a teenager.

Forty may be the new 30, she argues, yet “Fifty is still fifty.” How to alleviate its symptoms? Humor is Gurwitch’s Geritol. So take her advice and smile, but within reason. Otherwise you risk getting “too many wrinkles.” Not that jccgreenwich.org played it safe when we recently caught up with Gurwitch by Skype.

Q: Shakespeare also took a crack at the passage of time and aging, notably in Sonnet 64. Where do you guys differ?

AG: It’s really important to remember that the life span was so different. Thirty-five was it. So when Shakespeare talks about decay, it makes me laugh. The elder people he was writing about were 30! No teeth left! We are alive at a time when there are so many changing paradigms. Who are we as we go into different roles that people in the past didn’t have because of, as Shakespeare said, the fleeting time and decay? We’re in this unknown territory.

Q: How have you addressed this change in your books?

AG: What I like to do in my writing is to take what I’m going through and see how it fits in with the world. My first book wasFired! Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized & Dismissed. I got fired by Woody Allen, and I put it in a bigger context of what was happening in the larger zeitgeist. Everyone was getting fired. It was really about how employment is changing. Then the You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up book was really about how we’re in this new era where we’re potentially outliving our marriages. And now, with I See You Made an Effort, are we outliving our usefulness?

Q: In this latest volume, you take us from crushing on an Apple Genius Bar techie to helping a friend die to “sandwiching” between your son and your parents. How do you balance comedy with solemnity?

AG: The thing that attracts me to movies, to books, to any kind of art is the fine line between comedy and tragedy. I wasn’t kidding when I wrote in the book that after my mom’s mastectomy, I asked her doctor why they didn’t make breast implants for people her age if they could make a Tempur-Pedic. Why does she have to have a breast implant that’s going to make it look like she has a 20-year-old breast? Can’t they figure that out? It’s so dark. We needed that laughter.

Q: Talk about how you found humor -- and how humor found you -- with the assisted suicide story.

AG: That happened when I woke up my friend and said, “Don’t die yet, I don’t know your password!” This is a 20th-century problem. We just laughed so hard. We all needed it at that moment. And it was so awful. That’s why the book is called, “Compliments, Dignities and Survivor Stories.” How do you survive things? The way you do it is comedy. It saves my life every day.

Q: Is there anything about how your grandma aged that we can reasonably mine today?

AG: What I loved about my Grandmother Frances, whom I write about, is that people who lived through the Depression wouldn’t “take a wood nickel” -- I think that was the phrase. She was amazing. She went to the gym practically every day till she died at age 89. She always used that Pond’s Cold Cream. She took very good care of herself. But I don’t think you could have sold her Hope in a Jar Miracle Cream. She didn’t suffer fools gladly. What I write about in the book is that all the things you do to try to avert aging is really a zero-sum game. When you’re 50, no one who’s 40 thinks you’re the same age as them. I’m trying to retire that phrase, “50 is the new 40.” I’m trying to keep my grandmother’s practical nature. It has a little more dignity than trying to hang on to your youth. I call it a day at things like the Vampire Facelift. I’m trying to walk that middle road. Another thing I’ve learned from my grandmother is that, as one ages, one has to dress better when one leaves the house. When you see pictures of our grandparents, they were working class people, but on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, they were dressed to the nines. They never went out in sweat pants.

Q: What’s your response to people who say that age is just a number?

AG: “You’re living in a fantasy world!” There are two truths that live concurrently: it’s not your mother’s 50, but biology is real. What does this age look like? There are many variables. It depends on what kind of money you have, what country you live in, what kind of work you do. We are doing things at different ages than when our mothers and grandmothers did, and this is part of having a longer life. Many of us are enjoying better health at a later age and working longer, yet at the same time, there is a grey ceiling. We know there is agism in the workplace. I realized in the business that I started in, which was acting, the Nielsen ratings that measure viewers don’t even go past 49. What? What about me? I still watch TV!

Q: How does biology kick in?

AG: At 50 I said goodbye to my fertility and bread. You can’t eat anymore. The metabolism! This isn’t an opinion or a neurotic thought. It’s true. When your biology tells you something is over, that’s a very real thing. I’m not sure which I miss more, my fertility or bread. I like kids, but I love scones and muffins and Ciabatta and Challah. There’s a world of bread that’s now in my past.

Q: What are the advantages to hitting the half-century mark?

AG: I love mentoring young people. There are still a few things worth knowing that don’t have to do with understanding what an internet server is. Next week I’m doing a class at my local high school on writing a college essay. Very exciting. I’m also happier now than I was when I was younger. That’s been a choice that I’ve made in self-preservation. It is true: there’s also a lot more wisdom at this age. No one wants to hear it except others our age. But that’s okay. There are a lot of us.

Q: You write in your book, “I think what I want to age gracefully, to be the best version of myself. But when did I look most like “me?” How can your readers identify their facial incarnations that most express their true self?

AG: This is an unanswerable question. As I say in the book, I look in the mirror and try to make peace with my new face everyday, because it has really changed. There’s that saying, “Everybody has an age that they are.” It’s possible that the face comes into focus. In my life, I’m going beyond how I recognize myself in many ways that are great and in many ways that freak me out. A lot of us at this age are reinventors doing new professions, not only because of the way the job market has turned out but also because we’re interested in other things. We’ve lived long enough through those careers. We go beyond a definition of ourself.

Q: Is writing a book good or bad for wrinkles?

AG: If you’re writing in direct sunlight, very bad. But if you write in a little writing cave like I am, writing is very good for wrinkles.

Q: And how about for internal wrinkles?

AG: There are a lot of things that are worse for internal wrinkles than writing, like digging ditches.

Q. You write about aging out of your wardrobe. Where do you come down on mini-boots?

AG: It’s sort of like porn: you know it when you see it. I think there are a couple of great ways to dress that are befitting of your age. You can go eccentric, in which case the mini-boots are fantastic. Or you can go very streamlined. My budget takes me more to the eccentric, because I can’t afford Jill Sanders. So I come down yes on mini-boots. Yes on blue hair. But I draw the line at the baby doll dress.

Q: That’s tough to pull off even at 30.

AG: It’s even hard for babies. In my book I talk about the romper, which is basically an adult onesy. Really only wear that if you’re in the cast of Girls. No, I cannot wear a romper -- unless I am incarcerated or I am portraying the mentally ill.

Q: In your book you offer, “Anything you want to know about the eighteenth dynasty, just ask me.” What wisdom would we learn about aging, death and dying from Pharaoh Akhenaten’s wife, Nefertiti?

AG: Nefertiti died pretty young. In the immortal words of Debbie Harry from Blondie, “Nefertiti had the grace to “Die young, stay pretty.” However, Debbie Harry has made it look pretty good to not take her own advice.

Q: Who are your favorite humor writers?

AG: When I first started contemplating writing, I read a lot of S.J. Perelman. Then I fell in love with Fran Lebowitz. And there a couple of other writers whom I just love. One is Shalom Auslander and I’m just a huge fanatic for Gary Shteyngart. Those are four of my favorites, old school and new school.

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