The beauty of a hippie chick face-lift

I surrendered to vanity, but I wanted to keep it real. How does one avoid looking like a Beverly Hills real estate agent?

By Terry Greene Sterling

Aug 19, 2002 | About a year ago, I was blessed with an unexpected small inheritance. After depositing my windfall in the bank, I sat down with an iced Hanson's, blasted Taj Mahal through speakers big as steamer trunks, and mulled over my financial options.

I could invest the money to ensure a more secure retirement. I could sail the seven seas with my husband. I could donate to Doctors Without Borders or Amnesty International or the Sierra Club.

Or I could undergo a coronal brow lift, bilateral upper and lower lid blepharoplasties and a rhytidectomy -- also known as a brow lift, an eye job and a face-lift.

I chose the cosmetic surgery.

But not without a crisis of conscience.

I am an aging hippie chick, and one of our core beliefs is that cosmetic surgery is the domain of wimpy women who feel they must resemble youthful movie stars in order to be accepted in a culture still controlled by white males like Donald Rumsfeld.

We hippie chicks belong to a liberal subgroup of the baby boom generation, that graying postwar population tsunami that threatens to bankrupt America's Social Security system. The U.S. Census defines baby boomers as American men and women 35 to 54 years old. Hippie chicks belong to the elder strata (45 to 54 years old) of female baby boomers. According to Census 2000, there are more than 19 million women in this age group, about 13.4 percent of the country's population. My instinct tells me hippie chicks compose at least half of this particular demographic, which means, by my count, there are about 9.5 million of us.

For the record, hippie chicks are not and have never been hippies. Real hippies dropped too much acid and shot speed and roamed Route 66 in painted school buses. In their altered states, real hippies did not always bathe or brush their teeth. They were known to eat things like Hostess fruit pies for breakfast. They were not averse to having children out of wedlock and naming them after a winter month, an Indian chief or a predatory bird. Real hippies tended to ignore their formal educations.

Hippie chicks, on the other hand, were young women influenced by, but not wholly devoted to, the countercultural movement of the '60s and '70s. Although we pretended otherwise, we really did value our educations, and graduated from college in unprecedented numbers. We savored Acapulco Gold. We listened to Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish, Dylan, Donovan, the Beatles. We marched down campus malls protesting the military-industrial complex and the fact that no organic food was served in the college cafeteria.

We eschewed sororities. We believed in zero population growth and trumpeted the salubrious effects of the Pill, which at the time was a recent scientific breakthrough. We attended our classes barefoot, accompanied by dogs. We waxed eloquent about Carlos Castaneda, Kent State, Vietnam and the head busting at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. In short, we considered ourselves experts in matters of cannabis, public policy, morality and beauty.

I think our idea of beauty was all mixed up with the gender revolution that was sweeping America at the time. Androgyny was fashionable. We didn't wear bras. We didn't wear makeup. We didn't dye our long, uncut hair. We didn't shave our legs or our pits.

A lot of people think Jane Fonda was a hippie chick because of her anti-Vietnam antics. Wrong. With her Barbarella bod and perfectly coiffed hair, Fonda was much, much too well-groomed and uptight to be a hippie chick. Joan Baez, on the other hand, was our idea of beautiful. She was hairy and sloppy and comfortable with herself even though she had a big nose.

We frequently viewed our well-groomed mothers as unsuspecting victims of male domination. They suffered through cosmetic surgery, we reasoned, because they felt they had to look attractive to their husbands in order to ensure their own survival. They were helpless housewives. They had no way of supporting themselves. They were sex slaves. We tried to explain all of this to our mothers, but they didn't seem to understand.

Next Page: We'd furtively inch up to the mirror, pinch back the gobbler-like wattles

• View blog reactions