Lipstick

New Year’s Eve poses questions for all of us single people who forgot to make plans and so have no plans, but for me and I hope for many others it’s a blessed reprieve after all the Christmas activities and a time not for resolutions (my friend calls the people who appear at his gym early in January resolutionists—they don’t come back) but for a review of what worked and what didn’t work in 2022, with the longer list always being what worked.

Beyond that, even as a teenager I object to what seemed to me to be a false sense of excitement about the Eve, leading to disappointment. The hairdos, the party clothes and especially the make-up roused my always-available feelings of disgust which hid my fear that I would never be one of the merry-makers, and my disgust caused me to try to make my classmates at my all-girls school sign a pledge not to wear lipstick until they were eighteen. It will not surprise anyone that I was the only girl who signed the pledge and more or less kept to it.

Because I had made that vow, the lipstick my friends wore, their colors and their names, entranced me. The only name I remember is something like Fire and Ice but of course there were many equally colorful. Spread on the moist, smooth lips of young girls, those colors took on a phosphorescent glow, like the colors of tropical fish. And those lips seemed to me to swim in a warm limpid ocean of their own.

And although I took seriously the message in one of my favorite pop songs of that time, “Red Sails In The Sunset” with its ominous warning from the young male singer that his girlfriend, once married—or something-“will go sailing no more,” I of course also wanted to strap on that corset—what were they called? Merry widows?—cinch the crinoline around my waist, cover it with something pretty and pink, and twirl from partner to partner on the dance floor. If that had ever happened, I might have started wearing lipstick, breaking my vow.

But it didn’t, and so I’ll spend this Eve rejoicing in the fact that at this time last year, I made a list of resolutions that I never looked at again and promptly forgotten, but that due to grace and luck I’ve nearly completed fulfilled. They didn’t include a gym…

So don’t make that list, just imagine it or dream it and make a totally unrealistic vow and watch it, in unexpected ways, come into being.

And thank you for beginning 2023 with me.

In Women New Year's