GLOBAL CHAOS AND MY WRINKLY CLEAVAGE

All of it arrived at my house on the same day -- the morning newspaper and a stack of weekly news magazines (filled with stories of uprisings, nuclear meltdowns, economic hardship, murderous and egomaniacal rulers, and human suffering on an unimaginable scale) along with my AARP membership registration materials (because I'll be turning 50 next month) and a mail-order catalog that stopped me dead in my tracks.

It's called "AS WE CHANGE" and it's tag line reads:  Feel Better, Look Better, Live Better.  I opened it. And now I know what  I'll be focused on as I move into my mature years  -- my cleavage. That's right. Sure, nuclear power plant engineers in Fukushima are staggering out of pools of radioactive waste with burns all over their bodies, but according to this catalog, the flesh between my boobs is about to take on the consistency of a Ruffles potato chip, and I need to act fast.

I could buy a silicone wedge that shoves down between the twins to keep them from collapsing in on themselves at night and causing wrinkles.  ($35.) Or I could buy a special cream that lifts and firms so well that my decollatage will go from vintage saddle leather to butter-soft velvet perfection in an undisclosed amount of time. ($42.)  But that's just the beginning. Honestly, before this catalog, I never knew all the accoutrements I was going to need to get me through to my dotage. 

Concealer for my spider veins. Lip plumpers and eye lifters and any number of anti-aging skin products. Special magnifying eyeglasses with removable lenses, so you can leave one lens in actually see what you're doing while you apply makeup to the other eye! Ingenious!  Plus there are the body shapers, hair volumizers, and chin hair pluckers. Weight-bearing patches that attach to your pierced earrings so that your earlobes don't stretch down to your shoulder. Toe separators, kegel exercisers, bunion treatments and leakage pads of every description. And tucked in among these products were four pages of goodies designed to make me forget all about my crinkly cleavage. You know what I'm talking about -- pheromone oils, creams and gels and water-based lubricants, herbal libido enhancers, videos, and dozens of, shall we say, cylindrical objects designed to show me a really good time.

By the time I finished perusing the catalog, I was saying to myself, "MUAMMAR WHO?" and whipping out my credit card. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm not poking fun at the good people behind the "As We Change" catalog. They're only giving us soon-to-be fifty-year-old American women the important things we want and need -- after informing us we want and need them.

Susan