Starting next week, A Woman’s Nest blogs will appear more often, with book reviews and feature articles of interest to women at midlife and beyond. Our theme for August will be “Back to School,” which means, for many women of our age range, “Back to Empty Nest.” This challenging but liberating time can propel us into the next phase of our own lives. Hopefully you’ll find the information useful as A Woman’s Nest moves into its own exciting new chapter.
Good Morning, Monday will be a regular feature, less structured than some other posts, and will provide a casual wake-up to the week, mostly by discussing the weekend.
This weekend we went to the movies and saw Horrible Bosses. I know the movie gets high marks on Rotten Tomatoes, but I found it disappointing. While the actors did their best, and I chuckled a few times, I felt like I was being hit with a sledgehammer throughout the movie. Am I turning into a grumpy old woman when I say that “back in my day” we had the classic horrible boss movie: 9 to 5? We watched it later in the day just to feel better and chuckled all over again as Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Dolly Parton gave us the ultimate boss revenge fantasy.
I have loved going to the movies for as long as I can remember, starting with family trips to the drive-in when I was very young. Movies, plays, books, and songs have all fed my love of the written word. Seldom, though, do I see women like me characterized in movies. Certainly, Meryl Streep continues to truck along, turning in amazing performances of all types. Diane Keaton, in Something’s Gotta Give, gets to be sexy and desirable post-menopause. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, playing partners in The Kids Are Alright, leave their facial lines visible for all of us to see. Funny, though, that I can rattle these roles off so easily. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were so many richly drawn female characters over 40 that we couldn’t think of them all?
Who’s your favorite over-40 actress, or what’s your favorite over-40 female character?