Kathie Lee Gifford: ‘I’m Fertile Myrtle now’

Scientifically, we’re all aging one second at a time, day by day, year by year.

Thus the adjective is being used, really, to say something else. But, what exactly? That someone is beginning to show their age? Maybe, but that’s not true of Madonna. She’s fifty but she’s got the body of a twenty-year-old. Granted, Clint Eastwood looks like the Rock of Gibraltar, but I think the Rock of Gibraltar is beautiful. John McCain? I think after five and a half years in a Vietnamese prison camp and cancer, he looks amazing. And Kathie Lee? She doesn’t look a day under sixty.

Hey, it’s not complicated. Every day has twenty-four hours in it. The richest person in the world gets the same allotment that the poorest person gets. The difference is the poor guy is better off. He’ll never have to read “Bill Gates, the aging billionaire ...”

Lucky schmuck.

Da agony of da feet
If your eyes are the window of your soul, what the heck are your feet? It’s frightening to think what my feet say about me. If genetics are the “sole” determinator then my feet say that I am a hard-loving, hardworking (by hooker standards), much traveled, extremely gnarly person.

Oh, and one more thing, each of my big toes lives in a different zip code from the rest of my foot, so I bet that suggests a sort of schizophrenic existentialism. I don’t have a clue what that actually means but it felt good writing it.

Video   Kathie Lee, Meredith on life’s lessons April 14: What do “Charlie’s Angels” and Charles Manson have in common? TODAY host Kathie Lee Gifford’s new book, “Just When I Thought I’d Dropped My Last Egg: Life and Other Calamities,” tackles this and other topics. Today show

Anyway, back to my feet. Because they are fascinating. I remember my mother telling me about her grandmother and the horrendous pain she suffered from the crippling arthritis she had in her feet. My mother can be incredibly descriptive when she wants to be, and the picture she drew of Great-Grandma Florence Kathryn’s feet succeeded in making me pray that I would never live to be that old. But I have. My mother’s mother died of tuberculosis when my mother was only two years old, so Mom never did get a good look at her own mother’s feet. But I have a sneaking suspicion they looked a lot like my mother’s.

Now, my mother, Joanie, is a gorgeous woman from her ankles up — I mean, Miss America beautiful — but her feet wouldn’t win an honorable mention in the Most Beautiful Pig competition at the county fair. They have more than their fair share of bunions (the size of Delaware and Rhode Island), corns, calluses, neuromas, hammertoes, and various and sundry other ailments. And just like our great- grandmother before us, my sister, Michie, and I inherited the feet from hell. We really shouldn’t call them feet; they’re more like hooves. Even in my baby pictures you can already see the beginning of a small growth beside my big toe. So it was inevitable that I would also someday have wicked-stepsister feet even if I did nothing but sit around on my lard butt all day wearing orthopedic shoes.

But noooo, I had to choose show business. Ta da! Two shows a night, on a raked (angled) stage, and grueling choreography — all in four-inch Manolo Blahnik heels. See? I was stupid long before Carrie Bradshaw was. Forty years stupider. I would show you these feet I’ve just described, but I’m not able to. Nope. ’Cause I don’t have ’em anymore. At the age of fifty-four I took a good long look at my face. Then I took a good long look at my feet. And as much as I thought I could use a face lift, it was no contest. Hands down, the feet won.

I was tired of my feet telling me where I was gonna go, what I was gonna do, and how long I was gonna be able to do it. So I made an appointment with a Zimbabwean surgeon (don’t ask), and on November 16, 2007, I had both of my feet completely redone. I spent the next week in abject agony, and I spent the next month contemplating the murder of a certain Zimbabwean surgeon. Then, all of a sudden, miracle of miracles, the stitches came out, the pins came out, the ugly boots came off, and the Zimbabwean surgeon became a genius. I am now a veritable born-again, back to life Ginger Rogers. I’m seriously considering Dancing with the Stars, running the New York marathon, and becoming a Rockette, all the while moonlighting as a foot model for Manolo Blahnik himself.

So the moral of the story is: Reach for the stars, baby. But make sure your feet are up for the trip.

Now, about my face ...

Excerpted from “Just When I Thought I’d Dropped My Last Egg,” by Kathie Lee Gifford. Copyright (c) 2009, reprinted with permission from Random House.

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