This Is What 80 Looks Like to Gloria Steinem!
ON Tuesday, Gloria Steinem turns 80.
Do not bother to call. She’s planning to celebrate in Botswana. “I thought: ‘What do I really want to do on my birthday?’ First, get out of Dodge. Second, ride elephants.”
edit: MOST of what she does involves moving the movement forward. Speech to meeting to panel to fund-raiser. She frequently travels alone but it’s not lonely, she says: “On the plane I have my flying girlfriends, who are called flight attendants.” (Flight attendants play a large role in Steinem’s life. Sometimes they get her first-class meals when she’s flying coach. We will now stop to contemplate the fact that Gloria Steinem is 80 and still flying coach.)
... Steinem has always been such a positive cheerleader for the future that we really do expect, on one level, to hear her come up with some strategy for standing up to mortality. She’s always had a victory in mind, a vision of a better tomorrow where there would be no hierarchy of gender or race or income, where life flows as seamlessly as it seems to do in the stories she tells about the early Iroquois or Cherokee.
You do sort of count on her having a plan for the next stage. “We’re so accustomed to narratives, we expect there’s going to be a conclusion, or explanation or answer to the secret,” she said. “And probably the answer is, there isn’t.”
But there’s always an elephant to ride.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/opinion/sunday/collins-this-is-what-80-looks-like.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0
= new reply since forum marked as read
From left: Betty Friedan, Elinor Guggenheimer, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Gloria Steinem, among the founders of the National Women’s Political Caucus, in July 1971.
Credit Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
It's hard to believe she's 80 -- but then it's also hard to believe I'm 67.
69 here Blue!!! 
I used to refer to 'Ms' as 'The magazine,' and a friend's husband wasn't sure about what I was talking!!!
