Bruce Von Stiers

I watched Valerie Harper on the Mary Tyler Moore Show and in her own show, Rhoda. I read about her in the various tabloid rags and legitimate magazines over the years. She has been, at times, both a sought after actress and a pariah. She is brash and quite outspoken most of the time. So I was not a bit surprised when I saw that Valerie, “Val” to her friends, had written a witty and brash book. This little tome is called Today I Am A Ma’am. It was co-written by Catherine Whitney and published by Cliff Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.

The subtitle for the book is “And Other Musings on Life, Beauty, and Growing Older. It has 158 pages and was copyrighted in 2001. The book features illustrations by Rick Tulka.

The book has eight sections along with two pages of acknowledgments. The section titles are Pardon Me, Ma’am, De’Mean Streets, Tyrannies Old and New, Just Desserts, The M Word, Liftoff!, Humor Replacement Therapy and Imagine That! Each section has several segments in it. These segments have their own titles as well.

In the first section, Pardon Me, Ma’am, Val starts out by relating an incident that happened with her daughter. Val was telling her daughter a story about a “little old lady of sixty” only to be reminded (through fits of laughter) that she was herself a lady of sixty. This sets the tone immediately for the book. You know that it will be witty and irreverent. Later in this section she takes poke at greeting cards that are definitely not directed towards older women and how the demographics are skewed by the television networks so much that a show with an older cast doesn’t stand much of a chance to stay on the air, let alone get in prime time at all.

De’Mean Streets continues on with Val’s takes on women growing older and what happens to their bodies. In the segment called Smoke and Mirrors, she tells how an attractive woman can look in the mirror and still “see the Pillsbury Doughgirl.”

In Tyrannies Old and New, Val rants on Barbie, bad hair and clothing. One segment deals with shopping for clothes as a child. She cringed when her mother asked store clerks where the clothes were for the chubby girls and why did fat boys get tough sounding clothes like Husky. She also goes into an Now and Then seesaw with things like “you wouldn’t be caught dead with bra straps showing” and now “the more underwear showing the better. The bra as outerwear.”

With The M Word, Valerie takes a poke at menopause. In the first segment she laments on why men don’t have endure menopause. That is followed up by a page and a half of poking fun at male traditions in “If Men Had Menopause..”

Today I Am a Ma’am is geared towards women, but us guys can get a chuckle or two out of it. The man who picks up this book to read is probably a step or two beyond the typical pot bellied, beer drinker or young corporate exec that doesn’t appreciate older women.

Valerie Harper is indeed very funny and it shows in Today I Am a Ma’am.