Joni Mitchell: On Life, Loss and Missing Out on Woodstock

Caryl shares an exclusive playlist from Joni Mitchell's 70th birthday concert

The last time I saw Joni was in Toronto in June of 2013. The occasion that brought her back on stage was a birthday happening. For two nights, performers and musicians came to together in a concert celebrating the legendary singer’s 70th birthday next November. For the past decade, Joni Mitchell has not performed because of health reasons--she has Morgellons Syndrome, a parasitic infestation some doctors claim is delusional--and a voice that with age has been reduced in range.

Joni Mitchell's extraordinary career spans 50 years and mixes together the genres of folk, jazz, blues and a bit of rock and roll. The birthday tribute show that was part of Toronto's Luminato Festival, lasted almost three hours the night I saw it.  Combining familiar and obscure songs chosen by Mitchell herself,  the concert featured performers with reputations ranging from the little known: Liam Titcomb who sang the poignant If  to the famous, Rufus Wainwright who peformed the Yeats poem Slouching Towards Bethelehem acapello reinterpreting it like “a Scottish folksong”. Wainwright told the audience how he didn't grow up with Joni's music.  His mother, the folk singer Kate McGarrigal who died last year, was kind of competitive, he said, and banned the more successful Mitchell's music from the family's home.

Tina Turner: Vogue Cover Girl at 73

"Simply The Best" album, 1991                                           German Vogue cover, 2013

Second Look:  Tina Turner

Tina Turner has shattered the glass ceiling, at least in publishing terms.  This April, German Vogue has put the rock and roll legend on its cover with some splashy fashion spreads inside.  To date, the oldest cover ‘girl’ was Meryl Streep featured on the American edition in January 2012 when she was 62.  Even More magazine favors celebs in their 40s and 50s as its cover subjects.

Second Look: Sally Field

Two Academy Awards, two Golden Globes, three Emmys, honors at Cannes and Berlin film festivals and numerous other accolades are testimonies to her highly crafted skill as one of America’s most beloved actresses. Sally Field must know what it feels like to be liked by now (see reference to her 1987 Academy Award acceptance speech), without even taking into consideration her most recent convincing performance as one of this country’s most unliked First Ladies, Mary Todd Lincoln. She’d been lobbying for this role for over a decade as she’s had to do with most of her roles since we first saw her as Gidget on the TV screen in 1965.

Second Look: The Forever Girlish Karen Allen

You’ve seen this face before. That was years ago, but it looks the same, doesn’t it? Look harder. This face has definitely known a few decades since the first time you saw it; a fine tracery of lines lies over it, and resignation now shapes the set of its mouth. And yet you keep thinking, “It’s the same,” while you know it isn’t — couldn’t — be the same at all. 


The face in question is Karen Allen—and the one looking hard at it is Ben Brantley, the New York Times theatre critic. Brantley writes about her timeless and yet time-etched face in his review of A Summer Day, the first play in which Karen Allen has acted in more than a decade. Karen Allen looks much the same as she did in 1981 in undoubtedly her most famous role as Marian Ravenwood in the initial Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark film. Though Karen Allen seems to have hardly aged physically in more than 30 years, the 61-year-old actor has lived at least two successful lives that we know of. 

Second Look: Second Term

Here at Second Lives Club, we are well-acquainted with the gray hairs that come with the job of living a purposeful life. Much was made of how the hard work of governing had grayed President Obama's hair during the campaign. And, now Bloomberg Business Week has come out with an arresting cover of the how  the president will look in his second term. We ask: When will gray hair be a badge of honor rather than a battle wound of aging or stress? We HOPE for CHANGE.

Vote Like Your Women's Rights Depended On It

1964                                                                                           2012

Who doesn't remember the memorable words of Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me".  She recorded the song in 1964 at age 18, not old enough to vote.  Nearly a half century later Gore has produced a version that is an anthem for women's rights.  By voting today, our impact will be felt and our voices will be heard. Over 50% of those voting in the 2008 Presidential elections were women, and over 50% were 45 and older. It is estimated that 10 million more women and men will vote in this election. We're still fighting for the same issues that we were when Gore originally recorded this song. Listen to this chorus of women of many ages.  When women vote, women win!

Second Look: Penny Marshall

Most of us know her as Laverne (She predicts that’s all they’ll carve on her tombstone!), some as the first female director of a $100 million grossing film (“Big”, “They didn’t give me the money!”) and the second female director of an Academy Award Best Picture nomination (“Awakenings”), others as a Cancer survivor, former druggie (It was the 70’s!), a Pro-Choice advocate and a few as devoted friend (She declined directing “Forrest Gump” to support a friend just diagnosed with Cancer.). 

Second Look: Candy Crowley

Tomorrow night Candy Crowley will be the first female moderator of a presidential debate in 20 years. Let's hope she won't be remembered as just the “lady holding the microphone” the day after.  Candy was selected for the second debate which is a town hall meeting format (questions come from the audience and not the moderator), similar to Carole Simpson’s role in 1992 when Clinton, Bush and Perot were the candidates. Apparently, the Obama and Romney campaigns have set some strict terms for how active a participant the town hall moderator can be. Was a woman chosen to play this more limited role? 

Second Look: Mary Fisher, Carol Gilligan and Ann Romney

“TWENTY YEARS AGO this month, Mary Fisher (above) took the stage of the Republican National Convention at the Houston Astrodome and delivered a 13-minute primetime speech that was seen by many as a sharp rebuke of her party’s negligence in the face of the growing AIDS epidemic.”  So wrote my friend and superb wordsmith Dan Shaw in an enlightening profile in New York Times last Thursday. Will Tuesday night's lineup of female speakers at the Republican convention in Tampa Bay be able to inspire a depressed nation? 

Second look: Sue Simmons

Here at Second Lives Club, we hate firings of all kinds but we really hate public firings.  It’s bad enough to lose a job you love or a job you need—not to mention, a job you are really good at-- but it seems worse when it happens publicly. My mother read in the New York Times that I had been fired from my editor-in-chief job at Real Simple. I myself found out from the New York Post when a media gossip columnist from the New York Post called for my comment. (I declined. Call me now, Keith Kelly, I've had some second thoughts.) That’s why I felt so bad when I read last June that Sue Simmons, the co-anchor at New York’s local NBC news station, had been kicked from her chair after 32 years. Now, however, I'm happy to report there are signs of A Second Life. But first let me fill you in on her first life.

Second Look: Sigourney Weaver

You probably don’t remember her in her first movie role in “Annie Hall”.  (She was Woody Allen’s date standing outside the movie theatre.) You probably didn’t relate to her in “Alien” (one, two, three or four.) You probably admired her as Dian Fossey in “Gorillas in The Mist”. You probably empathized with her as the sex-seeking/sex-escaping neighbor in “Ice Storm”. You probably hated her as everywoman’s nightmare boss in “Working Girl”. Despite more than 45 movie roles over her more than 35 year-long career --her most recent film as a psychologist studying paranormal activity in “Red Lights” opened this week-- and many turns on the stage including this fall's new Christopher Durang play, she has never acted on the small screen. At least not until this Sunday when she plays Elaine Barrish Hammond, a former First Lady now Secretary of State, a stern diplomatrix in Chanel sunglasses, as one critic described her real-life inspiration.

2nd Look: Mia Farrow

                  Rosemary's Baby, 1968                                        Dark Horse, 2012                                    

Who could forget her performance in Rosemary’s Baby? Mia Farrow won the Golden Globe for new star of the year in l968 for portraying with heart and terror every pregnant woman’s nightmare: she was indeed carrying the demon child, Satan’s baby. This month she’s back on the screen in Todd Solondz’s Dark Horse, playing every modern mother’s deepest fear: her 35 year old son in the film is still living at home in his action-figure-filled childhood bedroom.

In her second life and perhaps most important role,

Second Look: Linda Lavin

         Linda Lavin in "Alice"                     Linda Lavin in "The Lyons"

Linda Lavin has been nominated for a Tony award for Best Actress again, this time for her portrayal as the classic overpowering silver matriarch of a dysfunctional family in The Lyons. We’ll find out tonight if she beats out Stockard Channing as the mother of yet another dysfunctional family on Broadway, Cynthia Nixon as a terminal cancer patient, Tracie Bennett as a late-in-life Judy Garland or Nina Arianda as a seductive and power-playing ingénue.

Caryl takes: A second look at Second Look

You've come a long way,  Ms. Ireland

When we started Second Lives Club 15 months ago, we had many goals, not least the desire to destigmatize aging. We also wanted to celebrate how women continually reinterpret themselves throughout their lives. The intersection of those ambitions is Second Look where we feature women whose beauty comes from living a confident life. Sometimes our subjects have been in the public eye early in their lives when their physical attributes outshone their accomplishments. When you take a Second Look at these women now, there is more integration of who they are with how they look. They’ve honed their game; they have built on their former experiences; their lives—not just their looks—are why we admire them. And, of course, their staying power.  As we say
in the tag line (and I've said before): Second Look reveals "The beauty of a confident life."

                                                                   
Maryl and I will continue to take a Second Look whenever it is timely—or catches our fancy. Sometimes it will appear on the left side and be a single, contemporary photograph of the subject. (But we want to make sure you know to click on the current picture to see the subject’s earlier self. Give Penelope Tree a try right now if you haven’t already done so.) Other times like today, a Second Look may warrant a center post with "then and now" photos side by side. You may have forgotten that Kathy Ireland in her first life was a model and three times the “cover girl” of Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue. But did you know now she's a highly successful entrepreneur? Today, at 48, Ireland is the CEO of Kathy Ireland Worldwide, a company that sells $2 billion annually in merchandising, mostly home furnishings and barely a swimsuit, outpacing Martha Stewart (another former model). The mother of three children, Ireland earns between $350 to $400 million annually from a brand that is predicated on “finding solutions for families, especially for busy moms.” She aptly depicts the beauty, brains--and confidence--it takes to continue to move forward in life.  A Second Look is more than just another pretty face.


(Please remember to "like" us.  We may be confident in real life,
not nearly as much on Facebook. We are trying to hit 200 by
April 1.)

2nd Look: Meryl Streep

                                                                                                             Vanity Fair

Meryl Streep won her third Academy Award last night for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady."  She won 33   years ago for  "Kramer vs Kramer" and three years later for  "Sophie's Choice."  Upon accepting her most recent Oscar, Meryl beautifully expressed how much she cherished her husband, her makeup artist (J. Roy Helland won his first Oscar last night) and all her friends.  Her values work for us.

2nd Look: Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda's Workout Book

Jane Fonda first wore this leotard on the cover of her famous 1981 workout book. Now more than 30 years later and at age 74, she put on the red and black striped number to promote her new exercise videos – Jane Fonda Prime Time. The series' title takes its name from her most recent memoir, which mixes tales from her own journey post 60 with scientific breakthroughs and self-help remedies. Unfortunately the videos don't show you how to stretch the life span of your spandex but they do provide Fonda-tested exercises to keep you fit and strong whatever your age.

Second Look: Charlotte Rampling

“You wake up one day, and you’re one day older,” says Charlotte Rampling. “You either accept it or you don’t.” Aging is just one of many topics including love, death and desire that the cult actress discusses in the new biographical documentary, “Charlotte Rampling: The Look".  Her musings are intercut with scenes from her many films, among them “Georgy Girl”, "The Verdict”, and “Under the Sand”.

The documentary is hardly a monologue, however. Director Angelina Maccarone brought together family, friends and confidantes—presumably of Rampling’s choosing--to stimulate the conversations. In one of the film’s segments on the subject of beauty, author Paul Auster tells Rampling, who turned 65 this year, she is as attractive now as at any age--and then quickly adds, like my wife (the writer, Siri Hustvedt). Described as an “exotic beauty” with “chilly sensuality” by reviewers, Rampling acknowledges in the documentary that she has avoided plastic surgery because, she says, everyone ends up looking the same. Her sultry hooded eyes may eventually keep her from seeing, she admits.

Earlier this year at Rome’s film festival where “Eye of the Storm”, another of her new films was screening, Rampling answered reporters' questions about growing older as an actress. “Who wants to grow old? Who wants to get lines?” In the movie, she plays a dying wealthy woman in her 70s in a dysfunctional family.” Rampling said that by allowing herself the “luxury” of being old, even ugly and unattractive while acting brought “extraordinary” rewards to the role. Rampling seems to have bypassed the film industry’s notorious age discrimination. Along with the documentary, she appears in two films that will be out soon. One is “Julia”, a thriller directed by her son Barnaby Southcombe. (In “The Look”, she and her son spar in some edgy but endearing acting exercises.) In the other movie “Melancholia“ from Lars von Trier, she plays the director’s now deceased mother whom he hated when she was alive.

Rampling has never shied away from controversial roles, whether it was “Max Mon Amour” where the title character was a gorilla or the infamous “The Night Porter". Legendary critic Pauline Kael described Rampling’s role in that movie as “degrading to women.” More recently, New York Times reviewer Stephen Holder said about Rampling in “The Look”: she's “an endlessly watchable mystery, an aloof but affable sphinx.”

2nd Look: Diane Keaton

Who doesn’t love Diane Keaton? At 65, Keaton is the poster child for our generation. (Did you know she made her acting debut in the Broadway musical Hair, the only cast member NOT to take her clothes off?) Over the last 35 years, we have grown up with Keaton in big-screen, emblematic roles: first, as the loveably ditzy Annie Hall (1977), then as the dropout single mom who swapped shoulder-padded suits and a high-powered job for the country life and a country doc in Baby Boom (1987), next as delightfully-revengeful spurned spouse in First Wives Club (1986), and finally as the naked cougar who finds love with her daughter's boyfriend in Something's Gotta Give (2003). Through the decades, we followed her styles and her life stages while she collected accolades and an Oscar as a talented actor. So what’s she up to now?

"As you know, I'm more of entertainment person," she told the New York Times this week, "but I have a real passion for design." These days Keaton is designing dishes for Bed Bath and Beyond. K by Keaton is a sturdy table top collection in “farm-y landscape colors”--wheat, grass, and bark, according to the heartland's sweetheart. Some of the stoneware cups, bowls and plates are stamped with her "trademark whimsy": Yum, Bite, Eat.“I don’t know why we don’t eat more food out of bowls," she told the Times reporter, "I could eat all of my meals out of bowls.” Good idea!

Keaton has always been an iconoclast, quirky but true to herself. Despite her high profile romances with such leading men as Woody Allen, Warren Beatty and Al Pacino, Keaton has never married. She came late to motherhood, quietly adopting a daughter, now 15, and a son, 10, with none of the ballyhoo of other Hollywood parents.

She’s taken unconventional roles and unconventional stances too.When producer-director Nancy Meyer cast her and Jack Nicholson in Something's Gotta Give, there was more concern about their box office draw than the scandalous the story line (middle-aged playwright gets it on with her daughter's much old boyfriend). "Let's face it, people my age and Jack's age are much deeper, much more soulful, because they've seen a lot of life. They have a great deal of passion and hope-why shouldn't they fall in love? Why shouldn't movies show that?" Keaton told Ladies Home Journal at the time. The film was a major success,grossing $125 million in North America. If onscreen Keaton had no fears being naked under the sheets, offscreen she is categorically opposed to going under the knife. She told More magazine in 2004, "I'm stuck in this idea that I need to be authentic ... My face needs to look the way I feel."

Keaton has always lived her passions, be they photography, music, architecture or design. Having lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Hollywood Hills and an iconic Spanish house, she is currently renting. (Told you she was the pulse point of our generation!). “But I am going to buy a piece of land and build once in my life. I don’t know if I can do it but I’m going to try.” Way to go, Diane. That’s the spirit of a 2nd lifer.

2nd Look: Hillary Clinton

Is this not one of the most gratifying photos of a self-fulfilled woman ever?  It’s our never-tiring Secretary of State yesterday on her way to meet with a few Heads of State on a few world crises.  Stunning…..no styling or make-up needed here.  What could be more attractive than a 2^nd lifer doing what she is passionate about and finds the most rewarding.  This has got to be what a 2nd life looks like.

One of our first and most memorable images of Hillary is her sitting rather demurely next to her husband being interviewed on nationwide television during his first presidential campaign.  Remember the headband.  Prim and proper….we had no idea what was behind those quizzical eyes and what was in store for her or us.   She took some big unconventional steps during her White House years and some have never let her forget her mistakes.  She didn’t either but chose not to dwell on them and to keep moving in a positive direction.

I was fortunate enough to be at a Women in Communicatons MATRIX awards ceremony where Hillary introduced one of the winners.  It was around the time when she was beginning her campaign for US Senator from New York.  She was running late but got there in time to make her speech fully made up.  She looked quite glamorous, almost too so, but being Hilary, her sincerity shone through despite the false façade.  I think it was the beginning of when she started to appear less skittish about how she was perceived and more comfortable in her own skin.  Clearly I find her amazing and yes because of her looks.  She looks like a woman who has moved out of her immediate area of expertise, who has made some bold moves and questionable risks, failed at some, won at others and is all the better for it in the end as are the people’s lives she continues to affect.  Just stunning!

Any more thoughts or photos of what a woman fulfilled looks like?  Some more ideas from the post:

     1)      Bio of Hillary Rodham Clinton
     2)  Hillary's own story, "Living History"

     2)      Women in Communications MATRIX Awards

     3)      Some headband ideas!