give away the mirrors in your house, one with every birthday

~ Live & Learn

A couple of decades ago, she had soured on celebrity, once and for all, so it seemed. “It wants to name you and diagnose you and keep you as a comfort animal,” Ms. Winger said the other day before quietly changing her tune. “Celebrity is not my favorite part of the gig,” she confided. “But it’s the price you pay for doing what you want.”…

True, she feuded viciously with former co-stars and directors. She once called John Malkovich …“nothing more than a catwalk model.” She endlessly needled Shirley MacLaine during the filming of the 1983 movie “Terms of Endearment,” tonguing her thigh during off-camera moments and teasing her crudely about her attire, her psychosexual antics causing Ms. MacLaine to flee the set … Has she mellowed over time? Could be… At 61, Ms. Winger is offering no excuses. “Sometimes I have less tact than other times,” she said.

“If I have an intention I’m going to try to stick with it and not be taken by someone else’s energy. “I’m on a quest; aren’t we all? With humans, it’s always a dance. If somebody’s moving slower than you are, you’ve got to get them out of your way.” Her truculence did not sit well with her long-ago peers or her studio bosses. “People said I’m too intense,” she acknowledged. “People can’t handle that.”  These days she is reserving that surfeit of passion mostly for her work…In many ways, she has never really stopped. What seemed like a hiatus in the mid-1990s was in fact a fertile time. Ms. Winger taught at Harvard, married the actor Arliss Howard, brought up three sons in Sullivan County, N.Y., and worked on memorable indie projects…

“It’s hard to accept your aging face,” she said. “You’ve got to be tough.” Still, you can hope to ease the pain. “You just give away the mirrors in your house, one with every birthday,” Ms. Winger said. “By the time you reach the right age, you have just one little mirror over your bathroom sink to make sure you don’t have any green in your teeth.”…

“It’s all about finding your groove at every age.”…“It’s all about chi, your life energy,” she said with Yoda-like serenity. “Like everything else, it goes through iterations. If it’s alive it changes.”…Till when? She fixed her companion with a sphinxlike gaze and grinned. “Can I get back to you on that?” she said.

~ Ruth La Ferla, excerpts from Debra Winger Comes to Terms With Fame and Age (NY Times, May 5, 2017)

15 thoughts on “give away the mirrors in your house, one with every birthday”

  2. I agree with the point of view, but it’s easier to have it when you are attractive and have always been so. There are some of us who have never been blessed with looks, although we make up for it in other ways. It’s easy to age gracefully if you have the body and face that holds up over time. But I DO agree with staying away from the mirror…it lies most of the time…

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  6. Aging with grace…life moves forward weather we embrace it or not..
    Cultivating Joy, Wearing a Smile and Being Sincere, Kind, Gracious and Being Willing to Listen and Care…ends up producing an inward beauty that shines outward…Character Development is a continual element in the the Journey toward a Fulfilled Life…Some cultures, some people honor and recognize that with age comes wisdom…and I think of what the eyes have gleaned, what the ears have heard, what the mind has thought, what the hands have touched, what are words have meant, what the heart has expressed and received, what the soul has refined, as one grows into aging…and one hopefully, internally, recognizes that reaching a point of maturity is a gift, we witness and we are individually and collectively impacting others by our actions and they us…each breath takes us further forward in appreciation and deeper into the depth of our Soul…Ms Winger is correct it is about Life Energy…/// Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting;but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.Proverbs 31:30

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  7. I think of what the eyes have gleaned, what the ears have heard, what the mind has thought, what the hands have touched, what are words have meant, what the heart has expressed and received, what the soul has refined, as one grows into aging…

    Wow. Publish that Friend. Publish That.

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    1. I also thank you for overlooking the 3 or 4 grammatical errors…I need to remember to step back, read out loud and then make those revisions!

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