I hope the only LAUGHS you seem to have during the holidays aren’t from the bubbles up your nose when you guzzle that full glass of champagne as your father-in-law attempts to regale everyone at dinner with details of his annual physical. If they are, you definitely need a lot more to LAUGH about. TREAT yourself to this LAUGH instead:

LAUGH #2. Anything by word-genius Nora Ephron, but for sure her new book, I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections.

Are you a woman over 40 whose workstation is so covered over with reminder Post-It notes that you could weave them together as a comforter?  Then TREAT yourself today to this new book from one of the funniest authors alive – at 69, that’s something to LAUGH about!   Writing about the annoying and alarming things that plague most women over 40, Ephron makes me LAUGH so hard I can almost understand the reason manufacturers of adult diapers are in business. But I won’t bring myself to forgive them for their insufferably awful commercials.

Ephron’s last book, I Feel Bad About My Neck, obsessed about that body part while making fun of older women who celebrate their wisdom (OK, I confess:  even I LAUGHED at that).  Sit down with her new one, I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections, and I promise you will never again think of Aruba merely as a pleasurable island getaway.  Nor will you ever again take your elbows for granted.

Screenwriter, film director, producer, novelist, playwright, journalist and, of course, blogger, Ephron could easily add stand-up comic to her portfolio.  During TV appearances to promote her book, she is both visually and audibly droll and hilarious. She is somewhat like your sardonic friend who isn’t really trying to be funny when she talks about her latest horror show in front of a three-way mirror, but who has everyone screaming with howls of laughter and empathy, and repeating her stories for weeks afterwards.

Ephron is the DARE-ING master of the kind of humor based on the cruelest facts of life, especially for women over 40. This somehow makes those inescapable truths easier to bear – for us and for her.  In fact, she managed to turn one of the truly awful periods of her life into a major therapeutic catharsis: the novel Heartburn, based on her discovery of then-husband Carl Bernstein’s affair with a mutual friend.  In the novel, Ephron describes the anti-hero husband as being “capable of having sex with a Venetian blind.”  I could only envision the literal manifestation of that phrase and how it would’ve cut the thing short – ba dump bump.  But I digress.  The novel was turned into the hit film by the same title, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.  Ephron doesn’t allow herself to get stuck at “life sucks.”  She moves immediately to yucks, and then to bucks.  If only all of us could be that talented.

Not only is Ephron’s talent for making us LAUGH serious business, her genius is in taking on subjects of style and substance that very few other writers would DARE with such courage and conviction.  One of my favorite examples is her grave and passionate excoriation of her own alma mater, Wellesley, in one of her earlier books, Crazy Salad.  Ephron tells readers that a certain Wellesley dean was advocating for graduates a life of, as Ephron puts it, “glazed politeness.” The dean was in essence advising graduates to plant themselves firmly in some middle ground of “tolerance,” about which Ephron objects:

“How marvelous it would have been to go to a woman’s college that encouraged impoliteness, that rewarded aggression, that encouraged argument. Women by the time they are eighteen are so beaten down, so tyrannized out of behaving in all the wonderful outspoken ways unfortunately characterized as masculine…We all graduated from Wellesley able to describe everything we had studied… yet we were never asked what we thought of any of it…”

Ephron’s intelligent point of view on DARE-ING to have a substantive voice resonated with me when I first read Crazy Salad some 30 years ago. But now that I’m in my fifties and observing younger women, in my work, in the classroom and in social settings, it resonates even more.  Aside from the shrill spectacles of media-maniac celebri-tots and faux-cialites gone wrong, some young women today seem so tentative and polite about everything. Everthing except exposing their cleavage and midriffs at inappropriate times in frankly unattractive outfits (more like costumes). And all the while they are affecting intonations in their speaking patterns that result in their punctuating, with an emphatic question mark, even their most assertive declarative sentences:  “Wow, Miley is really rocking that SKIRT?” (Emphasis added to make my point.)  In my opinion, what they really need to rock is a double dose of Ephron!

For all DARE-ING women but especially for women over 40, Ephron is the real deal. Unlike other writers whose work seems an obvious pastiche of ghostwriters, agents, publicists and others assigned to famous authors’ production line and marketing teams, she makes you feel that she’s been through what ails you, she’s still recovering, and she’s got the cure.  In fact, “Ephron” even sounds like the name of a great new drug for women over 40.  Imagine:

For all those cranky people you know:  “Get over your bitching.  Take two Ephrons and brawl me in the morning!”

Not in the mood?  “Sorry, not tonight, babe. I’m having a major Ephron moment.”

Can’t sleep?  “Heading to the kitchen for warm milk and an Ephron, dear.  Don’t wait up.”

So, go ahead and TREAT yourself with Ephron.  You’ll LAUGH until you cry, or pee, or fall asleep happily exhausted.  And, who knows, at your next family get-together, you might remember something Ephron wrote about older men who hog the spotlight, just as your father-in-law is about to regale everyone with a frame-by-frame analysis of his colonoscopy.  TREAT yourself to a little more Champagne, and pray that your LAUGHS are loud enough to drown him out.

Next blog:  More LAUGHS from two great comics over 40.

Seems there’s less to TREASURE than almost any other year in recent memory.  (Unless your memory is lodged firmly back in the 1920s.)

Well, cheer up and get DARE-Borne! There are so many people, places, and things to TREASURE from 2009, but if you think this is going to be a Hallmark cards/American Greetings moment, think again.  Shit flies, pigs happen, many lie sleepless in their battle.

Here’s my take on why it’s important to DARE TREASURE your life, your career (the one you have, had, or want to have; it’s your experience that counts), and the fact that there are geeky, cheeky scientists who study what constitutes true happiness. 

TREASURE the comic relief provided by those who obviously don’t know or appreciate their TREASURES until someone else enlightens them:

• Tiger “The Cheetah” Woods - pouncing on so many cougars and cobras and chick-lets that it’s hard to fathom how he could keep score on anything else.  For us making less than millions of dollars per year, there are so many reasons to TREASURE one’s existing spouse or significant other, or one’s solitude, if that’s your TREASURE, and none of those reasons have anything to do with multimillion dollar post-nuptial agreements.
• White House social secretary Desiree Rogers – so narcissistic she couldn’t take her eyes off her own reflection in the Potomac swamp long enough to protect the real glitterati she was hired to serve.  TREASURE New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd (deliciously DARE-ING over 40), who wrote the most biting, hilarious and dead-on excoriation of the poseurs and “arrivistes” that swarm Washington at any given time in any administration’s tenure.
• Senate Finance chair and Montana Democrat Max Baucus – who nominated his state office director (a.k.a.: chief coat warmer, favorite foot massager, and main martini shaker) for the job of U.S. attorney in Montana.  Obviously the senator took literally his name’s similarity to Bacchus—god of wine, women, and song—while asserting that he was separated from his wife when he began the affair with his staffer.  (Pun intended.)  I worked in D.C. for two long solid and sordid years, long enough to know that there were always far more pelvises grinding than there were noses to the grindstone.  TREASURE the fact that you’re not working in a job that requires you to accompany members of Congress to cocktail parties, take an accurate head count of the “guests,” and then hit them up the next week for thousands of dollars in “support.”

TREASURE the example of these women (strong characters, all of them) who turned the lemons that life hurled their way into rain and dough – building far bigger rainmaking machines than they might have, had their lives been “perfect”:

• Grandma Moses, who began painting in her 70s, after arthritis forced her to give up her career as an embroiderer.  For the next thirty years (yes, that’s 3-0, you read that correctly) until her death at the age of 101, she painted dozens of masterpieces, many of them depicting the rural scenes that grace sentimental holiday cards.  She exhibited all over the world, and her work has sold many times over for thousands and thousands of dollars.
• Mary Kay Ash, who started her eponymous cosmetics company at the age of 45, after being passed over for a promotion in favor of a younger man she had helped train.  Her how-to book for women turned into the business plan for Mary Kay Cosmetics, which might well make your holiday shopping list this year.  In 2008, the company had more than 1.7 million consultants worldwide and sales in excess of $2.2 billion.  Ash died at 85 years old, seven years ago, enjoying for many productive years the TREASURES that her midlife DARE-ing led her to create.
• Meryl Streep, the undisputed leading female actor of our generation, is redefining what is sexy, smart, and DARE-ing in women over 40.  She’s portraying characters who are exuberant, intelligent, and not afraid to stumble in reinventing themselves after a certain age or after adversity hits their lives.  Earlier this year, Streep’s astonishing portrayal of Julia Child—another DARE-ing woman over 40 who did not even publish her first great work until she was 49 years old!—brought tears of joy and recognition to millions of women who saw the movie about Child’s rise (screenplay written by another DARE-ing woman over 40, Nora Ephron).  Now Streep’s starring in “It’s Complicated,” a romantic comedy with Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin where her character, a “dumped” divorcee, is so hot, even the commercials might make some men blush.
• Susan Sarandon, another DARE-ing actor who has taken on roles that might make Streep think twice.  In “The Lovely Bones,” the new movie release based on the breakthrough bestseller by Alice Sebold, Sarandon plays a big-haired, chain-smoking, whiskey-toting grandmother coping with the murder of her young granddaughter at the hands of a sexual predator.  Like Streep, Sarandon is not at all afraid to laugh at herself and invite others to laugh even harder.

TREASURE the fact that, in the midst of all the turmoil, trauma, and triviality leeching from the louses, losers, and lechers that generate our yucks (fleeting as they might be this year), there are brilliant economists who are finally focusing on what really makes us happy – besides money, that is.

• The so-called “happiness economists”—Richard Easterlin, Bruno Frey, Richard Layard, and Andrew Oswald, among them—have contributed voluminous research on the so-called “Happiness Index.”   Such an index could become a more reliable measure of a nation’s wealth than GDP or GNP.  If only!
• The bottom line on TREASURES, according to the happiness economists, is this:  After a certain level, money doesn’t really make us happy.  Even the rich and famous agonize over whether it’s wiser to be sexless, reckless, or feckless, and 2009 has proven to be the year when even they don’t seem very happy.

So, yes, your retirement plan exploded faster than that bag of 100-calorie popcorn you left too long in your microwave while you were surfing the Web for your next job.

So what if your 25-year-old son and his newly minted MBA diploma have moved back into the room you had transformed into your gym?  And, true, lemons are still rolling off American assembly lines faster than we can pour lemonade into their gas tanks.

But just look at the dubious TREASURES of the rich and famous: Tiger Woods (more women than ever!), Desiree Rogers (more leopard stilettos and hotshot close-ups than Michelle!), and Max Baucus (old Bacchus never had it so good!).

Do we really want to be like them?  Probably not, and that’s enough to at least make us smile.