Altar Ego by Kathy Lette

I’d help design. On the front was a penis photographer dedicated to fighting patriarchy through her series of nude male ‘skinscapes’. ‘In close-up, from certain angles, the male armpit bears an uncanny resemblance to the female pubic area’, read the artist’s blurb.
    ‘For the curator of a feminist exhibition, Kate, you really know nothing about women. Women, all women, worry about three things only. Bad Hair Days. Shoe Shopping. And Thinner Thighs. If you renamed the feminist struggle as The Struggle For Thinner Thighs, Firmer Hair Mousse and Perfect Arch Support While Wearing Stilettos, membership would soar, you know.’
    Kate laughed. Insulting an Aussie is no fun. It’s like water off a duck-billed platypus’s back. ‘We want for women what women want for themselves,’ she said sickly , pointing impatiently at the photographs she’d instructed me to enthuse about for a television arts programme later that day.
    What we want for ourselves? Jesus. What
did
we want? A man
and
to be single. A job
and
to be free. Children
and
to be childless. A sensual encounter on a train with a witty, poetry-quoting stranger that leads to a romantic dash by private Lear jet to a Tahitian island so remote it’s not in the atlas … And then other times, just a quiet night on my own watching
Seinfeld
and eating Mars Bars in flannelette pyjamas. And not to age, ever. One thing today had taught me: I may be young at heart, but apparently I was middle aged in all the other places.
    This was confirmed when the Channel Four team arrived and Kate pushed me in front of the camera. The producer, one of those pubescent trendoids who make films that are about as interesting as watching paint dry (he once actually
made
a film about paint drying), looked at me through the lens then asked Kate if she had a presenter who was not so ‘chronologically gifted’.
    Kate and I looked at him blankly.
    ‘Experientially enhanced?’ We still had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Look,’ he said frankly, ‘the exhibition is about young artists, right? And I don’t think Ms Steele’s giving the right impression.’
    My geriatric blood froze in my clogged veins. ‘Yeah? Well you’re not giving the right impression of a producer either. The only thing
you
could produce is a urine sample.’
    Kate dragged me into the foyer before I could do any more damage. ‘What the hell’s eating you? We need the publicity!’
    ‘It’s a sore point, okay? The Beauty Führer at Selfridges this morning suggested that I’m old, ugly and too fat.’
    ‘So?’ said Kate. ‘Get a wider mirror.’
    It didn’t make me feel any better. Nor did the Super Babe with skyscraper heels and the shoulder-padded silhouette of an American quarterback that the producer conjured up to replace me. How could any woman look that young? She’d obviously been drinking embalming fluid.
    By the time I left the ICA later that afternoon, I was ready to buy some Vaseline Intensive Care, massage it in for about fifty years, then repeat. I was straight off for a boob and lube job.
    Okay, so I was older than I thought. But it didn’t mean I could no longer bite off more than I could chew – it just meant that I had to chew more slowly.
    But I wasn’t counting on what Life was about to dish up …

5
Bridesmaid Revisited
    IT IS A truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a husband. Which is why, a month later, all the usual suspects were gathered at St Andrew’s Church, Cliveden, for the society wedding of the season. Finally the Mountie had got her man.
    The fact that Anouska and Darius would love and cherish
till divorce do us part
was not in question; Anouska had spent more time choosing her gown than her groom. Her only criterion now, hubbywise, was that he be aristocratic. Darius’s obligatory epiglottal lisp, combined with his invincible repugnance for everything and everybody, indicated that he possessed the