Women Over 40 Rock!

Could it be? Could it possibly be?? For the second time this week a new series has begun starring, be still my heart, a wonderful actress well over 40 years old!! FX has had the intelligence to allow the multitalented Glenn Close to display those talents with a vengence. The new series DAMAGES aired last night and as far as I am concerned, tv lawyering will never be the same! Instead of the usual male hard-ass head of a legal company bent on winning at all costs, we have a female one! And her intelligence, maliciousness, scheming, and sheer ability to run the world around her with the lifting of her pinky finger is deliciously enjoyable to watch. Why would we ever go back to the ‘male way’ series are usually done?? Is she nasty? Yes. Is she dangerous? Yes. Is she evil and frightening and sure to cause horrendous things as this series wends its way thru the season? Yes. But will we be mesmerized by the sheer depth of the talent involved and smiling through it all despite our feelings of “Oh no, surely she wouldn’t do that”? Yes.
I wish her and the rest of the great cast, which includes a smarmy Ted Danson and an intelligent but naive Rose Byrne, among others, the best as they make their way thru the TV legal system this season, and I can only hope that this and the other ‘opening’ this week…Holly Hunter’s SAVING GRACE on TNT..will get such a wonderfully large audience that it will show the rest of the tv world how smart it would be to come up with more series starring…wait for it………actresses over 40!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Need more proof that life doesn’t come to an abrupt halt after hitting 40, despite what most commercials, ads, tv shows and films try to tell us? Well check out the July/August edition of MORE MAGAZINE and you’ll get ‘more’ interesting stories of women who have made immense changes in their lives mid-life. Among them is a woman who at 48 dropped everything and started a new business that became hugely successful, one who at 40 up and quit her unfullfilling job and struck out as a writer, and one who, at 49, decided she needed to walk and lost 120 pounds, discovered she had leukemia, dealt with it with her new-found strength, and met a new man and moved from Ohio to New Mexico in a heartbeat…saying that because of that first step (literally) she realized “…that I could do whatever I wanted to do, and that I was the one holding myself back all those years.” - Wouldn’t it be great if we could ALL make that realization??

There is also an interview with the lovely Holly Hunter in this edition, talking about her new TNT series, SAVING GRACE, in which she actually gets to play a woman of her own age…49! A big pat on the back to TNT for having the good sense to develop a series whose lead character is a 49 year old Oklahoma City detective who looks and acts her age, is unattached, “..tough-talking and free-loving”. You should definately be tuning this one in!

And heres to all of us over-40 women who won’t allow the mistaken views of most of the media to hold us ‘in our place’ and tell us who and what we should be! And a gold star to MORE for ‘discovering’ us and helping spread the word!