Aging – Baltimore Magazine

Eight Baltimoreans Who Prove That Age is Just a Number

Aaron Hope — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 14:00:26 +0000

Health & Wellness

Coming of Age

We celebrate a group of Baltimoreans who prove that age is just a number.

Written and edited by Jane Marion

with additional writing by Christianna McCausland, Amy Scattergood, and Max Weiss

Photography by Greg Kahn

December 2024

ROM THE FIRST written mention of the Philosopher’s Stone, whose power could purportedly produce the Elixir of Life leading to immortality, in 300 C.E., humankind has searched for a way to lengthen life—or better yet, achieve immortality. And that exploration has been ongoing, including 16th-century explorer Ponce de León’s search for the Fountain of Youth, the cryogenics movement of the ’60s, and scientists’ cutting-edge research on cellular reprogramming in the 21st century. (See Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who invested in a company that plans to rejuvenate cells to reverse disease.) Immortality—or anti-aging, as the experts call it—has been trending for a long time now. And while the source of—and secret to—everlasting life continues to evade us, we should see the process of aging for what it is: a total privilege.

According to a 2024 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, an estimated 62 million adults aged 65 and older are currently living in the U.S., which is roughly 18 percent of the population. By 2054, 84 million adults aged 65 and older will make up an estimated 23 percent of the population. In Maryland alone, more than a third of the population is over the age of 50, with some 1.4 million people over 60—and that number will continue to grow in the next several decades, according to the Maryland Department of Aging. In fact, thanks to factors such as improved public health, medical advances (new therapies for everything from Alzheimer’s to osteoporosis to cardiac care), and lifestyle choices (cigarette smoking is on the decline), the number of Americans aged 100 and older is projected to more than quadruple over the next 30 years, from an estimated 101,000 in 2024 to about 422,000 in 2054, according to the same census study.

It was poet Alfred Tennyson who said, “All things must die.” And yet, as this so-called “graying tsunami” washes over the United States, we’re not just living longer, but healthier, more meaningful lives. As baby boomers redefine what it means to advance in age, it’s possible for our golden years to look, well, truly golden. (It’s worth noting that the terms “senior” and “senior citizen” have long gone out of fashion and been replaced by terms such as “older adults” or “persons 65 years and older.”)

The secrets of living longer have become a little less of a mystery every day. Thanks to people like author and producer Dan Buettner, whose book, Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones (those are the places in the world with the most centenarians), became an Emmy-winning series of the same name, we now know that some of the key elements of a longer life include incorporating some form of physical exercise and functional movement into our daily activities. Buettner also highlights the importance of community, adherence to religious faith, and finding purpose—what the Okinawans call ikigai, which translates to “reason for living.”

Last spring, we launched a search to find aging Baltimoreans who demonstrate that age is, in fact, just a number. These aging Americans likely look nothing like your grandparents of days gone by—they are physically fit, tech-savvy, and have energy to spare. In their golden years, they’ve gone back to school, launched art exhibitions, started weight lifting, become activists, and gotten certified in teaching yoga. In other words, their passions have given them purpose. With mortality staring back when they look in the mirror, instead of slowing down, they’ve sped up, showing that the very concept of retirement is antiquated.

All the people we celebrate here share a young-at-heart enthusiasm. They are living proof that, while aging is inevitable, getting old is strictly optional.

Above: Baltimore textile artist and painter Ursula Populoh, 82.

Record-breaking powerlifter Manny Rechthand getting ready to work out at Fivex3 Training in Brewers Hill, where he lifts three times a week.

"I literally want to come off of a successful lift the day before I die."

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WEARING BLACK SWEATPANTS and black training shoes, Manny Rechthand demonstrates the proper way to squat while standing in the dining room of his Pikesville home. “If you go to an orthopedist, they’ll say, ‘You should never do a squat. It’s bad for your knees,’” says the 76-year-old as he bends his knees out to the side in the powerlifting version of a plié. “But that’s because most people don’t do it properly.”

Rechthand should know. Standing 5’4” and weighing some 145 pounds, he holds 12 Men’s Raw American Records in the 75- to 79-year-old division in his weight class. (For the uninitiated, raw powerlifting is a style of weight lifting done without supportive gear such as knee wraps and bench shirts.)

Before becoming a competitive powerlifting phenom, Rechthand practiced neurology for 35 years. “I really enjoyed my career,” he says, now sitting at the head of a dining room table so long that it looks like something straight out of “The Last Supper.” (It’s large enough to accommodate his four children and 12 grandchildren.) Even so, he wanted to explore other pursuits and “patchke” around, he says, using the Yiddish expression meaning to dawdle.

“There were other things I needed to do. People need to be able to say in mid-career, ‘Is this what I want to do?’ and ‘Is this all I’m ever going to do?’ And if the answer is, ‘Yes,’ then good for you. I made up my mind, I don’t know how many years I have left, but I wasn’t going to spend it chasing after money, big cars, and a fancy house,” he says. “It was a gamble, but I’m glad I did it.”

After retirement, Rechthand started increasing his routine at the gym. “I spent years doing the standard stuff that everyone else does,” he says, “but one day I said to myself, ‘I want to be strong.’” At the height of the pandemic, he bought a book by strength-training coach Mark Rippetoe called Starting Strength, about the science of powerlifting. “It was the most astonishing, eye-opening book I’ve ever read,” he says. One of the biggest revelations? The long-lasting effects of powerlifting, as opposed to the more endurance-oriented activities he’d been doing for years. “The underlying theme in barbell training is what’s labeled as progressive overload,” he says. “You stress the muscle to the point where it now has to react—and it reacts by building more muscle.”

In 2019, he joined Fivex3 Training in Brewers Hill and started his powerlifting journey in earnest. “Right away, they started me doing two lifts,” he says. “I was wiped out. When the trainer said, ‘Let’s go to the third,’ I said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’” he recalls, laughing. Even so, he was hooked.

His routine now consists of heading to the gym three days a week. He takes about three and a half hours to complete a workout that includes a warmup of lifting lighter weights before loading on the barbells to maximum capacity with intervals of rest time. As part of his training, he follows a strict diet consisting of chicken, fish, and plenty of raw vegetables. (The one exception is during meets—after weigh-ins, he carb loads by pouring an entire box of Fruit Loops straight into his mouth for fuel.) He drinks wine in moderation.

“When you’re growing up, if you’re not a great basketball, baseball, or football player, you’re not an athlete,” says Rechthand, who attended Brooklyn’s storied Erasmus Hall High School in the ’60s, which, with its 10,000 students, was the largest high school in the country at the time. “Now, I can do something that none of those guys can do. I can out-lift those guys anytime. The numbers don’t matter—you just feel empowered. I can handle my body. I can do what I want to do and I do it well and it has nothing to do with my genetics. It has to do with work. The beauty of it is that you can work and transform yourself.”

For Rechthand, the key to aging has been realizing that he can continue to grow, mentally and physically—and he plans to do both until he takes his last breath. “I don’t know when I’m going to die,” he says, “but I want to come off of a successful lift the day before, because that means I’ve been alive and young all these years, as opposed to just being old.”

—Jane Marion

Edie Brown at home in her apartment at Edenwald senior living commmunity in Towson.

"Sometimes I wake up and say, 'How did I get to be this old?'"

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EDIE BROWN IS TRYING TO SORT out a ribbon cutting. Her vision for the November groundbreaking of the affordable housing project Hope Village was derailed when she visited the site. “I had this big plan, but when I went to see it for the first time—the street’s so narrow we can’t get the media down there,” she says. “I’m still trying to figure out how to make it visually fabulous.”

Brown will no doubt find her fabulous alternative. A tiny alley is no match for the 91-year-old media maven, who has been the driving force behind some of the city’s most memorable events as head of marketing and public relations at the Baltimore Convention Center, CFG Bank Arena, and through her firm, Edie Brown & Associates. She was a consultant to the state’s economic development department under Gov. Bob Ehrlich and worked closely with former Mayor William Donald Schaefer promoting the city during some of its most challenging years.

At her home in the Edenwald senior living community in Towson, she gestures to the wall of her office. “This is my life,” she says. There are innumerable awards, framed articles, and photos of Brown with Bill Clinton, Nancy Reagan, Luciano Pavarotti, and Elton John—there’s even a framed piece of the vestment that was on the altar when Pope John Paul II came to Baltimore in 1995, a gift from then-Cardinal William Keeler to express gratitude for her help with the visit.

She keeps her hand in the business, doing occasional work for clients like About Faces Day Spa & Salon and the pro bono gig for Hope Village. She’s on the board at Everyman Theatre and is on Edenwald’s trips and travel and speakers committees. “I’m a people person and connecting and doing these things makes you feel good about life,” she says.

With her crystal-blue eyes offset by impeccable makeup (she uses custom blend cosmetics courtesy of a makeup artist she met through About Faces), Brown looks years younger than her nine decades. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease within the last four years, she quips that the only way it has slowed her down is that it makes mascara application tricky.

“You can never feel sorry for yourself. You have to be positive,” she says. “Some days, if I have negative thoughts, I say, ‘Okay girl, put your two feet on the ground, get up, get dressed, put your makeup on, and get moving.’”

Brown seems to know everyone and has a packed schedule of dinner outings. Her zest for life comes naturally, but may also have its roots in her youth “I didn’t quite fit the mold growing up,” Brown says. She came to Baltimore at the age of five with her parents, who were fleeing Nazi Germany. Unlike other children with big families and deep roots, “I had to be adventurous, out there. I had to make my own way.”

And make her way she did. As a newly married woman, she taught English and Spanish at Garrison High School, where Barry Levinson and Ben Cardin were her pupils. When she had her children, two sons and a daughter, she took up pottery and opened a boutique for local craftspeople. But after five years, “I was tired of dirty jeans and being alone,” she remembers. With absolutely no experience in public relations, she boldly applied for the job at the convention center and was hired in 1979, setting the course for her remarkable career.

Brown has an inexhaustible amount of energy. A believer in movement, especially as one ages and particularly given her Parkinson’s, she spends time stretching every morning, does Pilates, and circuit trains at Rock Steady Boxing Charm City. She still plays nine holes of golf every Tuesday and frequently visits her children, nine grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. Stan, her beloved husband of over six decades, died three years ago. She says living at Edenwald has made her feel the loss of friends and neighbors a bit more acutely than when she was living independently.

But she refuses to be maudlin. “I stay too busy to be depressed,” she says. “You have to stay positive, stay active, and just have joy in every day that you get to see the sun rise or set.”

—Christianna McCausland

Educator Debbie Ramsey poses in an empty lot that will become her organization’s new building on Salem Street.

DEBBIE RAMSEY HAS DONE many things over the course of her 73 years. First, as a Baltimore-born child growing up in North Carolina, she worked in the tobacco fields starting at the age of 10, which is when she began thinking about aging and longevity.

“At the end of the day, I looked at my hand, and it was black with gummy tar from the tobacco and the nicotine,” she says now, thinking back some six decades. She decided then to never smoke a cigarette. “It was a science lesson for me. I saw myself in the future. I saw myself being healthy. I saw it was my responsibility, and that I had the power to make a decision.”

Decision-making would become a recurrent theme in Ramsey’s life. She left North Carolina and its tobacco fields as a teenager to change her life’s trajectory. As Ramsey puts it: “This is a 17-year-old Black girl leaving the safety of her home to come to Baltimore because she feels she can do better. What kind of an attitude does that tell you?”

More changes followed, as she left an early marriage, got a degree, held a series of jobs in college and university administration offices and in libraries, and then became, of all things, a Baltimore City police detective. “Never touched a gun; my family never had weapons in the house. We talked ourselves to death when there was a conflict. Those are the skills I have. I know how to talk my way out of a situation,” Ramsey says now, laughing. “I thought, as long as they train me and give me the right tools, there’s nothing I cannot do.”

It was a job she held for a dozen years and loved, and she credits it with springboarding her, in 2012—when Ramsey was just in her 60s—to found Unified Efforts, a nonprofit that offers free after-school programs to Baltimore kids.

But before she did that, after she left the police force she started her own private detective agency. “At that time, I was the only Black woman in the state of Maryland who had that license. It was called ‘Ramsey and Son,’ though my son was only in middle school,” she says, chuckling. “I did that on purpose so I could get some jobs.”

Ramsey not only got the jobs, she also got further involved with community consulting and after-school bullying and violence prevention programs in West Baltimore’s Penn North neighborhood. “When that community gave me the green light, I hit the pavement running.” Those programs also funneled into her current work, which continues Ramsey’s mission—or missions.

“I fell in love with the community as a police officer, because I saw a lot of problems and a lot of people suffering, and there were a lot of things going on that people needed help with,” Ramsey says.

So Unified Efforts is helping with hot meals, field trips, equipment, supplies, and more, including Ramsey’s latest project, Life Is a Plunge, a program that aims to give every child in Baltimore City access to swimming lessons from certified swimming instructors. It’s a project with special meaning for Ramsey, who grew up during Jim Crow, when Black children were denied access to public swimming pools and beaches and thus many never learned to swim.

“I know I’m 73, but I’m operating as if I’m 17, because I reinvented myself at 17,” says Ramsey, who also recently began taking fencing lessons, something she’d always been interested in doing, and then finally decided to take her first lesson—at 72.

Ramsey keeps transforming herself and, in the process, transforming those around her. “I said, ‘Well, I did it for me, why can’t I do it for others?’ I did it for myself; and then as police officer, I did it for the community; and now I’m doing it for the children. I don’t think that energy has left me.”

—Amy Scattergood

Textile artist and painter Ursula Populoh in front of one of her many colorful murals in her Baltimore rowhouse.

"I work constantly, I read constantly, but I never watch TV."

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“I GREW UP POOR AND AM OLD,” writes Ursula Populoh, 82, in the introduction to her website, a virtual gallery of her artwork in textiles, painting, doll-making, fabric design, costumes, and more. “Both can be a blessing or a curse, depending on one’s point of view,” she continues, “yet both are fundamental for my art practice.” To visit Populoh’s Baltimore rowhouse—with her own murals, paintings, or art on every wall—is to see the tangible evidence of what she means by this, as well as her long and spectacular artistic journey.

Populoh’s career has been defined by her origins. Born in Bavaria during World War II and raised in post-war Germany, she came to the U.S. in the 1980s after marrying an American. When the marriage ended, leaving her with two small children and no education or money, she worked her way into a long career as an accountant. In 2008, she moved to Baltimore to be close to her daughter, who is on the faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and retired in 2011. Retirement didn’t last long.

“In 2011, when I didn’t know what to do with my life, I went to Europe for a year,” says Populoh as she gives a tour of the rowhouse that doubles as an ad hoc museum, jammed with murals, quilts, handmade clothing, icons, and the kitsch she loves. She’d wanted to go to Turkey to learn a particular sock-making pattern but wound up in Bulgaria instead. “Instead of learning how to knit socks—which I did at the same time—I learned how to paint icons,” she says.

She also walked the Camino de Santiago de Compostela with a MICA professor friend. “We were talking about my love of art and what we can do, and she said, ‘Ursula, go to MICA.’ I said, ‘But I am 70; how can I go to MICA?’ She said, ‘Who cares?’” Populoh finished her BFA in three years, graduating in 2015. “And ever since, I have been an artist,” she says, laughing.

Populoh has been busy these last nine years, exhibiting her art with a solo show at School 33 Art Center in 2017; making crankies, an old art form that uses an illustrated scroll spooled through a box to tell stories (hers use felted applique on canvas); and creating countless quilts, dolls, embroidery, costumes, and paintings.

“People tell me I should do house tours,” she says, pausing under one doorway with Diogenes' phrase, solvitur ambulando—“it is solved by walking”—painted above it, the Latin letters entwined with flowered vines. More vines connect framed artwork and hanging quilts and move from room to room, blossoming into Mexican-influenced flower murals before leading upstairs to detour into more living and workspaces, all crammed with colorful art and artifacts, as if Populoh’s life and art were completely intertwined, which they are.

“I’m 82. I walk literally every day, two miles, three miles,” she says. “I’m vegan. I work constantly on something. I read constantly; I never watch TV. People tell me, ‘Oh, you are lucky you’re so healthy.’ But this has been a lifelong process; you can’t decide when you’re 70.”

She considers her art career, something that she could only realize with retirement and the economic freedom that came with it. “I think people don’t realize how much more important this personal freedom is,” she says. “This stupid expression: ‘Age is just a number.’ It is if you worry, ‘Oh, I’m 82, will I make it to 90?’ If you are 30, you’re not thinking these thoughts. But it’s the same, because you never know.”

What she does know is that worrying about things, or seeking permission for them, is not the way to go through her life. “I walk out the door and it’s either an hour or two hours, sometimes it’s three hours of walking.”

Because walking can solve many things. For Populoh, so can art.

—AS

Climate and peace activist Jean Cushman, photographed at Sherwood Gardens.

"I think that socialism will make the world a better place to live."

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FROM HER TUSCANY-CANTERBURY condo, Jean Cushman proudly shows off a homemade protest sign: “JHU! STICK TO HEALTHCARE NOT WARFARE!” She sometimes wields that sign at protests of the war in Gaza on the campus of Johns Hopkins University, which she says has a huge contract with the Department of Defense. At other times, she stands across from the campus on Charles Street handing out pamphlets that read: “Humanity At Existential Crossroads! WAR or Green New Deal. Congress needs to hear from you.”

Jean Cushman has been arrested for civil disobedience while fighting against a Western Maryland gas pipeline. She has “bird dogged” then-Gov. Larry Hogan to get him to stop fracking in Maryland. (It worked.) She’s been part of a human chain on the steps of the Annapolis State House to protest that same pipeline. (She got knocked over by an “aggressive” Republican congressman, she says, and almost fell down the stairs.) Was she ever scared? Not when she was arrested, she says. “It was a catch and release kind of thing.” But yeah, when that burly congressman knocked her over—she can’t remember his name—that was a little dicey.

Jean Cushman is, after all, 75 years old.

She came to activism relatively early in life. She was raised in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, and her mother volunteered at the nearby Chester Crozer Hospital, in an impoverished part of town. She started to wonder, “Why am I so well-off and people are struggling like crazy not more than 15 miles away from where I live?” It animated something in her.

As a freshman at the University of Virginia in 1970, she was introduced to the notion of feminism, which appealed to her. After college, she got a job in manual labor—working construction—just to prove she could. There were other jobs, mostly at hospitals, which is where she got into unions and workers’ rights. Her activism snowballed from there.

She became friends with a group of self-described socialists and communists who lived in Mt. Pleasant, D.C. She really thought she was going to be part of a revolution. Then she realized that the white supremacists had the guns and her communist friends didn’t. She decided the revolution could wait.

From there, she got married, had three kids, and moved to Southern Avenue off Harford Road in Baltimore. The activism took a backseat to raising her children, although she did eventually become director of the nonprofit Episcopal Community Services Maryland in 2005.

And then, one day around 2012, she badly broke her femur. She had been prescribed injections of anticoagulation medication and accidentally took too much. She ended up in a coma for two and a half weeks, which led to a traumatic brain injury, or TBI. She had to relearn how to talk, walk, think. She admits it was a dark time and she even considered ending her life.

Climate and peace activism brought her back from the brink. Investing in a future for herself and her grandchildren gave her a purpose and she threw herself into it completely, working with Food & Water Watch, Jewish Voices for Peace, and Baltimore Peace Action, among other organizations.

She defies the notion that as you get older, you get more conservative, although she understands why that happens.

“I think it’s because [older people] long for things to be the way they were,” she explains. “But I can’t think of a time in my life that I would go back to if I could.” Instead, she wants to move forward, building a safe and equitable future for everyone. “For me, it’s become crystal clear that the two existential issues are war and the climate,” she says. “And if we don’t do something fast, it’s going to be bad.”

So, she continues to fight—reading books (her shelves are crammed with books on history and resistance), educating herself, and protesting whenever—and wherever—she can.

As for any old people who are afraid to join the ranks of the activists? “Come on! I’ll show you the ropes,” she says. “It keeps you young.”

—Max Weiss

Yogi Jana Long strikes a pose at her home studio in Ashburton.

AS A COLLEGE STUDENT in the 1970s, Jana Long was “accidentally” introduced to yoga. “As a young girl, there was this thing I liked to do we called ‘the bicycle,’ where you hoist your loins up in the air and pump your legs,” recalls the 72-year-old Long, sitting at her dining room table in Ashburton. “We now call that a shoulder stand—I had no idea it was called anything.”

But one day, while channel surfing, she caught a glimpse of Lilias Folan, known as “The First Lady of Yoga,” in such a shoulder stand—and it was life-changing. “I was like, ‘There’s someone doing the thing I like to do,’” she says.

Before long, Long was hooked on yoga. “When I got into this, there were no yoga studios—in fact, you didn’t tell people you practiced yoga because they thought you were in a cult,” says Long, who radiates warmth with her wide eyes and lovely laugh.

By 2005, after becoming certified in integrative yoga therapy, her secret was out. The following year, Long started her own business, Power of One Yoga, teaching yoga throughout the Greater Baltimore area. Long continued her yoga training, including earning a certification in working with seniors. In 2008, she retired from her job as an administrator at The Washington Post and has been teaching yoga ever since.

Additionally, Long is executive director of the nonprofit Black Yoga Teacher’s Alliance (a Facebook group with 30,000 members that supports Black yoga teachers) and runs events such as Yoga As A Peace Practice, offering support to people impacted by violence.

Of all her work, she’s proudest of the community she has created. “A group of my students went to Indonesia together,” she says. “They sent me photos of themselves doing yoga. I was like, ‘This is what it’s all about.’”

—JM

Actor David Keltz at the gravesite of Edgar Allan Poe on the grounds of Westminster Hall and Burying Ground.

SITTING AT HIS REGULAR TABLE in Canton’s Annabel Lee Tavern, David Keltz talks about how he got his start at his vocation, playing the part of Edgar Allan Poe. “Actually, I probably started the preparation when I read my first Poe story, at 13-years-old, because I knew then I wanted to be an actor,” says Keltz, now 79.

Unsurprisingly, it was “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the short story for which Poe is probably best known. Also unsurprising, considering the location, he’s come to the tavern this afternoon dressed as Poe himself (black vest, cravat, and topcoat; 19th-century hair and ’stache), which nobody at the restaurant remarks upon—because Keltz performs there frequently, or because it’s a Poe tavern, or because Baltimore.

It is an outfit that suits him perfectly, after having spent three of his nearly eight decades performing one-man shows in character as Poe, in Baltimore and across the U.S. and Europe, including at Prague’s International Poe Festival. And he has no interest in hanging up his topcoat. “Oh no, no. I get more enthusiastic about it,” he says.

After college, Keltz moved to Baltimore, where, on Halloween night 1991, he recited “Annabel Lee” at Poe’s grave. As the years went by, his gigs and his repertoire grew. “I’ve got over five hours committed to memory, but nobody ever wants that much.” He says that usually folks just want the highlights, but “then they’re hooked.”

He’s been hooked, too. Because although he’s had other careers and jobs, it’s Poe that he considers his life’s work. “Over the years, the stories became more and more authentic, almost real,” he says of Poe’s writings and his appreciation for them.

—AS

Artist Dick Brown surrounded by his work on the walls and on the floor of his Fells Point apartment.

DICK BROWN’S EARLIEST MEMORY of making art was doing an abstract drawing inspired by a book on Indigenous people. “It covered different tribes and their geometric designs and feather headdresses and the colors were just so incredible,” says Brown, who was six at the time. “I lived in that book.”

Pretty soon, he was making art wherever—and whenever—he could. While living in Cuba in 1958 (his father worked for the Department of Defense), he painted models and carved volcanic rock. Later, when his family moved to Spain, he combed the beaches for cuttlefish bones and carved intricate reliefs along their surfaces. By college at the University of Southern Mississippi, he was making leather goods (including a guitar strap for the lead guitarist in the blues band Omar & the Howlers) and selling them for pocket money.

“I’ve always had a passion for art,” says Brown, petting his toy poodle, Roxy, while sitting on the deck of his Fells Point home. “No one ever helped me discover that—no one ever picked up on my artistic talent.”

After earning his doctorate in counseling psychology (a profession he calls “more art than science”) from the University of Southern Mississippi, Brown moved to Baltimore to work in therapeutic foster care in 2004 and is now the co-owner of Apex Counseling Center, an outpatient mental health clinic in Highlandtown. Along the way, in his free time, he has worked with stained glass, sculpted in bronze, wood, and stone, and pursued many mediums, including watercolor, graphite, and pastel. But the mediums he returns to again and again are mosaic and paint.

As an artist, his career highpoints include two gallery shows at Highlandtown Gallery, and the installation of his four-foot-tall bird, which now sits permanently in front of the American Visionary Art Museum. (It was dubbed “The Bluebird of Happiness” by AVAM founder Rebecca Hoffberger.)

Brown, now 75, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis back in 2012, but that has not kept him from making art. “It takes my mind off my body,” he says. After the diagnosis, he hired his own psychotherapist to help him look at his life and deal with the prognosis. “I said, ‘I really don’t feel that I’ve done all that I can,’” he recalls telling his therapist. “People are helped by psychotherapy, but do I really get credit for having been helpful if I’m paid?” His therapist asked how he might have done things differently—and his answer was to create more public art. “I realized I still had plenty of time,” he says. “Even if I knew my expiration date, I still had time to do something.” So Brown got busy making an intricate mosaic on the exterior of Apex. “People comment on it all the time,” says Brown. “It’s nice some of the public art at Apex is enjoyed by anyone who happens by.”

Even as the disease has led to weakness on his left side, he’s driven to make art. Right now, it’s a large canvas he’s coated in vibrant acrylic with four figures he’s titled “The American Family.” The borders of the painting explode with psychedelic patterns and shapes that harken back to his days as a self-professed hitchhiking hippie. His daughter, Caroline, makes him break for meals. Otherwise, he gets lost in the work.“I’ve always been connected to creativity,” he says. “It puts me in the zone where time ceases to exist.”

Nearly every inch of Brown’s apartment is dedicated to his art. Canvases are stacked on the floor, while the walls offer an explosion of Technicolor mosaics fashioned from hand-cut shards of glass that glint with gold and silver and keep company with a bronze figure and a blue bust made from liquified stone.

Brown, whose email address includes the word “Dicasso,” says his art is inspired by the “obvious artists,” including Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, Joan Miró, and David Smith. “If I get stuck, I’ll go tour AVAM or a craft show or Artscape for inspiration,” he says. His work, which he describes as “modern religious neo-impressionism,” is filled with religious iconography and faces and eyes often loom large as a leitmotif. As a therapist, he jokes, “I peered into people’s heads.”

He has no pretense about how others interpret his art.

“The biggest bullshit is the artist’s statement,” he says. “To me, it’s not about making a statement—if my work happens to touch someone, then that’s the statement.”

—JM

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Ma’am Overboard

Angeline Leong — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 08:30:00 +0000

The other night, at a bar, I got ma’amed.

It wasn’t the first time it happened, but it was the first time I can recall a fellow woman directing the term to me, and it stung. I think the issue was that she was in her early 20s, blonde, and being genuinely polite. Ten years ago, I was also a (moderately) polite server with blonde hair slinging drinks and accidentally shocking customers with formal greetings dripping in antiquity.

Currently, I am 34 years old. I’m an elder millennial who remembers landlines and call waiting and didn’t get my first cell phone until college, and even that thing had a walkie-talkie button. I vividly remember Y2K and 9/11 and, perhaps somewhat less culturally significant, the creepy countdown to the Olsen twins’ 18th birthday. I remember being amused as sociologists and ad executives tried to define and understand my generation’s motives. I remember reading endless contradictory think pieces on how we were lazy but resourceful, born of analog but coming of age in digital, entitled but scrappy.

And as with all things when you’re young, the world’s attention on my generation felt somewhere between an eye-roll and being warmed by the sun. We didn’t yet understand that all older generations examine the hell out of the new ones, wondering how we measure up, the ways we might save the world, and the ways we’d be sure to end it. We just knew that we were young, and that this was of deep interest to everyone.

And now we’re all mostly in our 30s, being called ma’am by the kids we used to babysit.

The ma’aming, obviously, struck a nerve with me.

When it was just men using the term, I could chalk it up to politeness. I could let myself believe that these were respectful males who were taught to err on the side of caution—that I was somehow only running into the kind of men who would never assume a woman’s pregnancy or interrupt her during a board meeting. But to this woman, I was thoroughly a ma’am, an exhausted-looking mother of two, trying to fit in a few pages of the books she’s been reading for months while waiting for a friend to show up for post-bath and bedtime drinks.

Once I got home, the ma’aming sent me racing back to my gently lit bathroom mirror to confirm what I generously had been thinking was a self-critical over-exaggeration: I really do look older. The lines around my mouth don’t disappear when I stop smiling. Despite my dogged commitment to the one good thing Paris Hilton ever taught me—wear sunglasses at all times, at all cost—crow’s feet are spreading out from the corners of my eyes. Even the Botox I had tried on a lark last summer was betraying me, allowing me to express a genuine reaction to the neck wrinkles I’d just spotted.

Aging, as with all things human, is weird. In the immediate wake of being ma’amed, fortified by two Negronis, I felt haggard and irrelevant. Without my youth glowing out of my pores, who was I? Until that night, I had never been so old in my life.

But in the harsh light of the next morning’s low-key hangover, and despite an entire night spent aging, I looked—young-ish again? And since then, it’s been fascinating to see how the aging process is both linear and entirely random. There are days I catch myself in the mirror and think I look great for someone with two toddlers who is mathematically in her mid-30s. And then there are the days I walk by a reflective surface and wonder who the crypt keeper dressed head to toe in Madewell is. The good days give me confidence and hope; the bad ones give fat commissions to the skin care team at Sephora.

Curious about the non-surgical ways I could freshen things up a bit, I decided to take action and made an appointment with plastic surgeon Nadia Mostovych at Belcara Health in Mt. Washington. I arrived armed with a picture of the endless bottles, pots, and snake oils that comprise my skin care regime and the need for an explanation about my sudden lurch into early middle-age.

What I learned was a science lesson in the art of decay. It turns out collagen production starts to decline at a rate of about 1 percent each year once we turn 20. It takes a while to notice, which is why so many people cite their early 30s as the time they first begin to see signs of aging. It’s clear that external elements like exposure to the sun, pollution, and nicotine can hasten wrinkles, but there’s not much to be done about curtailing the natural aging process.

“During consultations, some people say they feel like they look tired,” says Mostovych. “What they see in the mirror doesn’t look like them anymore. People get stuck on how they looked and felt during their late 20s and early 30s and can eventually feel really out of balance when those things no longer match.”

The good doctor began our consult by explaining the bare minimum of preventative skin maintenance—mineral-based sunscreen, retinol, and a good vitamin C serum or any kind of antioxidant serum—but as she moved into the more serious options to turn back time, I physically and emotionally found myself leaning in. In what can only be described as a self-imposed game of “vanity chicken,” I began wondering exactly how far I’d be willing to go with the myriad treatments, factoring in my current age, income bracket, and short-lived tanning bed stint in college.

Surprising even myself, I was willing to bypass traditional facials entirely, and head straight into the realm of procedures, which is how I found myself having my blood drawn on a sunny Friday morning. I opted for a platelet-rich plasma facial, better known to those us of who follow open-book celebrities on Instagram as the “Vampire Facial.” Essentially, blood is drawn and put in a centrifuge to separate the platelet-rich plasma. It is then placed on the skin, and a micro-needling treatment ensues. This treatment is ideally performed three times over the course of three to four months, and it’s meant to leave the patient with smoother, clearer, glowier skin.

2020 is a wild time to be alive.

In the immediate days following my treatment, I looked pretty banged up. I cancelled weekend plans, hunkered down with my generously portioned bag of post-treatment serums, and waited for the bruising and redness to subside. (If you believe we are close enough friends, I will show you post-procedure pictures, otherwise you’ll have to use your imagination or Google.) And after a few house-bound days, I noticed a genuine difference. My skin was tighter, my fine lines kinder.

The procedure isn’t cheap, and there is some recovery downtime, but it’s also painless and the results are immediate and can last more than a year. My toddlers haven’t noticed the improvements (rude), but close friends have, and I’ve been fielding texts and sending updates to the women in my life who are also finding themselves on the less buoyant side of collagen production.

There are clearly plenty of ways to fight the good fight against aging, but the question remains: Why do we fear it? How can a $50.2-billion-a-year industry thrive raging against the one thing our bodies all inevitably do, whether we intervene or not?

To explore that, I reached out to Michiko Iwasaki, a geropsychologist and associate professor at Loyola University. Aging in America, she pointed out, is not like aging in most countries. In her native Japan, she says, “Aging equals wisdom, and there is a more positive perception.”

But here in America, where we emphasize youth and vitality, it’s quite the opposite. “When the term ageism was invented in the late ’60s, people unconsciously accepted that aging is bad,” says Iwasaki. People do plastic surgery to find better work and partners, because looking young gives them an advantage.”

And we’re expected to act youthful, too. How can we genuinely embrace the fact that our bodies are aging when culturally we’re expected to work long hours, say yes to everything that’s offered, ignore accumulating PTO, and work during maternity leave? And with the advent of social media, we’re now keeping tabs on our own selves about just how much we can fit into a day while looking happy and attractive. Energy and activity are our social currency, and physically aging is the way we eventually betray ourselves.

As I considered my conversation with Dr. Iwasaki, I realized the timing of my interest in experimenting with anti-aging treatments isn’t simply vanity—it’s existential. Though I’m not past child-bearing age, I do not intend to have more children. My body is beginning to show wear and tear through, among other things, the cacophony of knee cracks signaling my impermanence each time I lift myself off the floor after playing with my kids. And the fact that my face is starting to look a bit older actually kind of matters. I automatically and subconsciously react to people based on their perceived age every day. I once gave a ride across a parking lot to a much older female stranger mostly because I assumed that, unless she was armed, she posed no threat. And when I encounter high-schoolers, I vacillate between not being able to stand them and wanting them to think I’m cool. If I’m making snap judgments about people based on their age, I think it’s reasonable to assume the same is happening to me.

So, is it possible to age gracefully? It seems, like so many things, that the answer is somehow highly specific to each of the eight billion people on this planet. For some, it might mean decades of plastic surgery, while others might rely solely on sunblock and water as their beauty treatments. For me, it will likely fall somewhere in between. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to get older, but I think I’ll always be a lady perpetually—though non-surgically—on a mission to look good for however old I am. Because, as Iwasaki points out, “Whomever, wherever we are, we are all aging.”

Just be careful whom you call ma’am along the way.

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