Do You Believe (in Life After Love)?

You may have been hoping for some news on Cher. If only! I don't know what's happened to Cher -- she's disappeared. She's a haunting example of how our culture's obsession with youth drives older celebrities into virtual seclusion. Last I saw her, she was on a talk show, her face so stiffened from surgery and Botox that she could barely smile and definitely couldn't do her likable, cynical sneer that often preceded a good sardonic joke. She was like a wax dummy of Cher, though she managed to emit a few ironic comments, mostly to do with how it sucked to be over 50.

I feel awful for Cher, because like Meg Ryan, she seems unable to give up on youth. It's like aging is some ghastly curse, not a natural process. I don't dispute these women's attitudes, though. My own feeling is that aging is kind of like a horror movie. Awful things show up that are not going to go away. Unlike almost everything else in life, you aren't overreacting when you perceive signs of age. It's not like a sudden conviction that you have a fatal disease because of a weird feeling in your chest, but the next day the feeling is gone and so is the belief you're dying.

Nope. Those white hairs aren't going anywhere -- in fact they're gonna be joined by a lot more white hairs. And that weird lump in your middle is also not going anywhere. These facts are unbelievable -- you've spent your whole life thinking of yourself as young. For me, it was a habit. Suddenly I'm looking at evidence to the contrary, thinking: What the freak is all that white hair doing on a young person like me's head?

Oh the humanity.

I heard a Christian fellow preaching the doctrine on the subway the other morning. A man asked him something about why dinosaurs had disappeared, and I didn't hear all of his answer but at one point he said calmly, "Man got eaten because of sin. Because he was a sinner."

It was strange hearing these old-fashioned ideas in a city that prides itself on progressive ones. I was struck by the word sin, how simple it is. It seems to reduce life to a battleground of good and bad, which is like a game. Sin and you're out. Don't sin and you win. It's not hard to see the appeal in such a simple life view.

I was also interested in the preacher because I just read Walter Kirn's Mission to America. It's about these two clumsy, poorly dressed missionaries descending from a religious sect that seems like a mixture of Mormonism, Christian Science, Anthroposophy and Shaker, to try to get new blood for their dwindling stock. In other words to impregnate women. They are very serious and pure at first, spouting all this crazy philosophy that rang a bell with me for the years my sister was involved in Waldorf schools, but they're quickly corrupted by junk food and coffee, which they've never tasted since they've been eating a bland, vegetarian diet in accordance with their wacky doctrine.

I'm not doing the book justice. I'm too worried about Cher. Can she move at all anymore? Does she have to be fed through a straw?