Print Media & Collage

56”W x 42”L

2026

These women are appropriated from my hip-replacement physical therapy exercises, my dad’s AARP magazines, and Google searches for “middle-aged women contortionists.”

Lately I’ve been reading midlife writers—Miranda July, Rebecca Solnit, Nora Ephron, Anne Lamott, Elizabeth Strout, Annie Ernaux, Joan Didion, Patti Smith—women who find humor, wonder, and tenderness inside the mess of getting older. They write about the tension of staying informed without becoming overwhelmed, and of keeping moving when the world asks us to sit still.

Olivia Newton-John and Jane Fonda embodied something I still need: the insistence that movement is not just about staying fit. It is about staying awake, engaged, political, and unwilling to disappear.

Maybe getting older is its own kind of choreography—learning how to bend, fight, wobble, and keep going.