Mary-Louise Parker on Being Fabulous At 51

From Harper's BAZAAR

Yesterday, Harper's Bazaar celebrated nearly a decade of the annual Fabulous At Every Age reader contest, where five inspiring readers spanning from ages 20 to 60s+ were honored by Bazaar, Estee Lauder and Saks Fifth Avenue. After enjoying a weekend of pampering in New York City, the finalists were celebrated at a chic luncheon at Le Bernadin Prive where actress and author Mary-Louise Parker addressed the finalists, sharing memories of how she's dealt with aging through the years. Below, read Parker's speech, and see our amazing finalists.

When I heard the theme for today's luncheon, two very strong images collided in my memory bank. The first was a difficult one. It was a birthday of mine. I remember this morning in striking detail; how I woke with a low level hum of pure "blah," then rolled over underneath those navy blue sheets. It was a bed I hadn't been sleeping in long and wouldn't occupy much longer. Basically it was a stopover, but I was there for a handful of reasons that made sense to me, and anyway, I opened my eyes and looked at the clock. It was morning, which meant it was my birthday. I couldn't bear that thought. I'd reached a certain milestone that some of you ladies are familiar with. You may have been excited by it but it was daunting for me.

Maybe some of you will understand why I laid back and put the pillow over my face and started to cry. I felt over. Any kind of youth felt over. Natural beauty was solidly in her grave. I felt past my shelf life, my "use by" date. I wept from somewhere deep, trying to accept that I was in a new phase, whatever that was, and I would needed to accept that and learn to love myself, to accept this day, because it was here now-and maybe it was a new start. On this morning I was 22 years old.

Now, I knew somewhere that it was absurd, that I was irrational, but I cried anyway. My boyfriend at the time who was nearly double my age, told me that I was absurd and irrational and that made me cry harder.

"If you are old, what am I?" he asked me.

"A dinosaur," I said. "But it's not the same, it's different for men," I said.

In that sense I was right. It was different for them, and still is, but I was wrong about everything else. This is where the second memory comes in. When I turned 35 I didn't have my life in place in the way I'd dreamed, but thankfully I had a watershed moment where I acknowledged how uncommonly blessed I was. I gave a tiny shrug and decided, I'm gonna dress up. I am gonna make all my lovely friends dress up, too. We are going to have a party. I got all my girlfriends to dress in their finest and off we went in feather boas, turbans and high heels, to the Central Park playground. We went down the slides and pushed each other on swings, we popped up and down on the seesaw, and piled into a limo with champagne. I gave them each a book I made of my favorite poems and we read those poems aloud softly in that big black car and then we opened the roof and turned up the music and sang at the top of our lungs to all the passersby in Times Square. The limo driver shuttled us to the Pleasure Chest in the [West] Village, and we skipped in and bought sex toys in our ball gowns and tiaras. We drove up the West Side Highway to my friend Whoopi Goldberg's house and danced and ate cake and banana pudding and laughed our heads off. We celebrated until the wee hours and then we drove to Ray's pizza.

Big surprise: I found myself feeling more attractive in my mid and late forties. I was apologizing less, and apologizing less for my apologizing. I was not as apt to believe someone else when they told me who they thought I was. When I became a mother, I had to understand that around my daughter, I couldn't say I hate my hair, my body looks awful, or nothing looks good on me and, what will I wear? I couldn't indulge that needy, self-loathing voice and not expect her to copy it.

So, I am wildly in favor of being here to celebrate with you. I keep trying to go back to the theme of celebration, and here is the important part: I have to celebrate whether all of me wants to or not. When I turned 50 I was on the verge of doing absolutely nothing, but snapped out of it when my friends insisted we celebrate. We rented a fabulous if somewhat creepy Tiki-room-themed house in the desert and stayed up all hours. We hiked and did yoga, got henna tattoos and ate candy. We had massages. We swam in the pool with our kids and when they went to sleep we drank from coconuts with fans sticking out and danced and karaoke-d so loud and for so long that the police showed up. I wasn't worried though, because I had all the confidence that comes with being half a century, and besides, they were cute, those policemen, and young enough to be my offspring. One of my friends announced that it was my 50th and they said, "Noooooooo!" Maybe they were only flattering, but I happily took it when they said they didn't believe her. "No, I promise," I said, and I am quite proud that I made it through and can stand here in front of you with flowers in my hair.

I am glad to be here instead of somewhere whining about how I was more sparkly last year. Even if I am at that moment where my dear friend Jeff Mashie needs to gently remind me that it's maybe not the best moment to roll up in cut-offs and seven-inch heels with a halter top, I can now pull off calling a group of policemen "nice young men," and I can crawl into bed at 9pm with my readers and a stack of poetry and no one will accuse me of being pretentious or anti social. Most of all I have the particularly sweet honor of hearing a little voice telling me, "Mommy, you look pretty."

If I live another day, another year, or another decade, I am nothing but lucky to be around. It's really never too late to understand that what is shiny is at some point going to deepen to a richer and more interesting patina, and that change is an evolution, not a devolution, and it's always, always, worth celebrating.