The Silver Revolution
If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.
- apparently Emma Goldman didn’t actually say this, but it captures the essence of a lot of things she did say
When you argue with reality, you lose—but only 100% of the time.
- Byron Katie
When I was in preschool, I asked my mom how old she was. Over twenty-one, she said. Intrigued by the mystery, I kept asking, but no matter how many times I repeated the question, that was all the answer I could get. Finally, when I was six, she told me: She was forty. I had no idea why this was such a big secret, but I felt very grown-up to be entrusted with it.
Almost three decades later, I was interviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle about my solo show Let My Enemy Live Long!, which was playing at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. The article revealed that I was thirty-three years old. When I showed it to R, a fellow solo performer who was about to launch her own show off-Broadway, she responded with horror, Never tell a reporter your age!
Why not? I started to ask, but her look stopped me cold. Did she really have to tell me about our culture’s obsession with youth and beauty? Obviously a woman in our industry had everything to lose by revealing her age.
Once, when I was a student at Oberlin College, I attended a workshop on gender roles, in which the male students were randomly assigned income levels and the female students were assigned numeric attractiveness levels (also random, not based on our actual appearance). We were then lined up in order and paired with our opposite-sex numeric equivalent. The takeaway was that when it came to mate selection, in mainstream American culture, men were valued for their wealth and achievements, and women were valued for their beauty, which, almost by definition, included youth. The exercise shocked me, but it resonated. I only had to witness the endless media parade of wealthy old men and stereotypically beautiful young women to see it. And though Hollywood has made tremendous strides in the intervening years in depicting powerful, sexy middle-aged women, you still regularly see male romantic leads opposite females a decade or two their junior. If you ever see that equation reversed, it’s in some kind of twisted Mrs. Robinson context. There’s no male equivalent for the word cougar.
My mom, Juliet Popper Shaffer
My mom’s attitude about age was surprising, given that she was a feminist before she had a word for it. As a child, her mother made her take small, ladylike steps. She hated it, and as soon as her mother was out of sight, she’d take giant strides, as big as she possibly could. In high school, she again defied her mother by choosing math club over music club. And as an undergraduate at Swarthmore in the early 1950’s, she was part of a movement to allow female students to wear pants. She went on to a career in academia, where early on she experienced discrimination from many universities that blatantly refused to hire women. After a stint at the University of Kansas, she ended up on the faculty of the statistics department at UC Berkeley, where she was frequently the only woman in the room. Yet she didn’t seem to see the contradiction between those values and the idea that a lady should not reveal her age.
Like most females in this country, I went through years of dieting and hating my body, starting out in junior high and lasting into young adulthood. In my senior year of college, I began developing a solo show called Miss America’s Daughters, the story of an aging Miss America coaching her daughter on how to follow in her footsteps. Through song, poetry, and monologues, some original and some from other sources, the show satirized the culture’s unrelenting focus on women’s appearance and explored the painful toll it took on our psyches. I ended the show with a piece by Marjory Nelson from the book Shadow on a Tightrope, in which an old woman finally comes to terms with her aging form. The monologue, and the show, concluded with the words: I realize that the “worst” has happened to me. All that I’ve been warned about and worried about has occurred. The knowledge frees me. I know who I am. I’m fat, and I’m old, and I’m home free.
I loved that monologue so much. But I wondered: Why did she have to wait so long to be free?
I toured with Miss America’s Daughters shortly after graduating college. Periodically people would marvel aloud at how someone in her early twenties could have accumulated such wisdom. I hadn’t written all the pieces, of course, but I’d put them together, and I performed them with conviction. What those admirers didn’t know was that, passionate as I was about the show’s message, I was light years away from freeing my own psyche from the very pressures I was portraying.
Which brings me, naturally, to the subject of hair.
When I was thirty-seven years old, I colored my hair for the first time, in preparation for my wedding. At that point it was already significantly threaded with silver, though you had to get pretty close to see it. My brother, who’s a hairdresser, suggested I dye my hair back to its original chocolate color for the wedding photos.
Once I’d started coloring, I kept going. Being a rather seat-of-the-pants type of person, as well as the mother of a one-year-old (my husband and I having reversed the traditional order of the marriage-parenthood equation), my maintenance was less than perfect. I colored it myself, at home, and rather than doing it on a regular schedule, I did it when the roots got so obvious that I couldn’t stand to look at myself. On one occasion, six years after I’d started coloring, my cue that it was time for a touch-up came when a child in my son’s first grade class innocently asked, Why do you have a white stripe on your head?
Over the years, I came to resent it. The time, the money, the toxic stink of the chemicals, the ever-returning skunk look when I didn’t attend to it fast enough, and the fact that every time I did it a new stain appeared somewhere in my bathroom.
Nevertheless, I persisted.
When I moved from California to Michigan in 2017, I colored it a gorgeous deep blue as a tribute to my years by the ocean. That led to a year and a half of experimentation with shades of green, blue, and purple, before ultimately cycling back to brown.
By February, 2020, I’d maxed out my capacity to keep up with my increasingly stubborn roots. A month before Covid made going natural the next big thing, I visited California and asked my brother to chop it all off. When I looked in the mirror after doing the deed, I loved the clear, fierce quality of the face looking out from beneath my freshly shorn skull. She looked like someone I would like, someone who was unapologetically herself.
In some ways, my decision to embrace my natural color is aspirational. It points to the person I want to be, rather than the person I am. I want to be a person who is at peace with the natural process of aging.
According to this article in The Washingtonian, around 87% of women and 11% of men color their hair. A friend who has recently been in the job market tells me that for women, trying to present themselves as youthfully as possible is critical if you’re hoping to get hired. Benefit News reports that in a recent AARP study, a staggering 90% of people said that age discrimination in the workplace is common, with 64% of women and 59% of men saying they’d experienced it directly. So please believe me when I say that I’m not judging anyone for their choices. I’m fortunate to work for myself, and if anyone is choosing not to take my writing workshops because of my gray hair, they’re not telling me about it.
For the past twenty-five years, I’ve studied the teachings of the Buddha, which direct us to look as clearly as possible at our own experience. One of the first things most people notice when sitting in meditation is that everything is in constant flux. We spend our lives on shifting sands. There is nothing—not a thought, emotion or sensation—that remains solid and unchanging under close observation. And so a culture that is fixated on maintaining the appearance of youth is a culture of delusion. We are all aging. We will all die. What’s the point of denying it? The knowledge of mortality can make us profoundly sad at times, but it can also highlight the preciousness of the time we have.
My mom is eighty-nine now, by the way, and almost every time I see her she notices, with a kind of wonder, that my hair has more gray in it than hers.
Let’s start a revolution, in which all of us, at the same time, stop giving our time, money, and energy to the so-called “beauty” industry. If we do this, we can learn what humans in their thirties, forties, fifties and upwards actually look like. And while we’re at it, let’s change the narrative about what makes a person valued and desirable. A revolution that honors the lives we’ve lived and the ways those lives write themselves on our faces and bodies. A revolution that respects the wisdom and beauty of aging without in any way discounting the insight and beauty of youth. A silver revolution.
For my fifty-fifth birthday this year, I asked my friend, the wonderful photographer Robert Chester, to take some photos of me frolicking amidst the fall leaves. I thought it would make a lovely metaphor. The glorious reds and yellows and oranges of fall are no less beautiful than the lush greens of summer or the spectacular pale blossoms of spring. Winter, too, is stunning in Michigan in its black and white simplicity, the way snow makes the familiar world strange and new. Moving back to the Midwest, where I grew up, after almost thirty years in California, has reawakened for me a deep connection to the beauty of the seasons. I want to embrace the changing seasons of my own life with the same wonder and reverence.
In spite of all this, it’s entirely possible that one day I might wake up and say, Screw it, I’m going back to brown. If I do, don’t judge me. We’re all navigating a slippery incline when it comes to embodying our ideals. And as much as I believe in embracing the natural aging process, I believe with equal force that each person should have the freedom to decide for themselves what makes them happy when it comes to their personal style.
So if you want to dye, go right on dying. We’re all dying anyway (insert groan). I promise I’m not judging you. But if you want to join the Silver Revolution, I’ll be dancing right beside you. Because in our revolution, that’s how we roll.
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