STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

Just had to post this Fug: Well-Played because I thoroughly agree with them. I love seeing middle-aged women both looking their age, and looking gorgeous--especially in Hollywood. How amazing does she look here? Trim and sexy and confident but not desperately clinging to youth. Awesome.

There are a lot of reasons to love Jamie Lee Curtis -- she's the original scream queen, she did that funny striptease in True Lies, she was in Trading Places, she's married to Christopher Guest and he's, you know, fairly talented himself -- but for me, it was A Fish Called Wanda that yielded unconditional adoration of her. I love that movie. Love. There's something about her delivery of the line,  "KEN! SOMEBODY just CALLED!" that kills me. Plus, the giant red glasses she wears are kind of amazing. If you can look hot through those, you can do anything.

Anyway, the reason I'm opening up to you in this tedious manner: I wanted to be up front about it. Full disclosure. I love Jamie Lee, always have, always will.

However, that all said, I'm still pretty sure I'm being unbiased in suggesting that she looks, to  put it bluntly, freakin' awesome these days. Maybe even better than ever.

Okay, so I'm not sure if the leg blotches are self-tanning errors, or birthmarks. I understand birthmarks -- I have a large, opposite-looking one on my knee where, apparently, all of my entire body's available skin pigment went -- but given that I've never noticed these before, I have a sneaking suspicion they're tanning-lotion snafus. Which is really too bad. I'm not a fan of self-tanner in general, but she's in front of blinding camera lights and that can make a girl look ghostly, so ... honestly, it kind of makes me love her more. In the imagined words of Us magazine: "Stars -- They're Just Like Us! They bungle self-tanner!"

But, who's focusing on her legs, anyway? I can't stop staring at her face. She's radiant! Her skin looks fantastic. The short gray hair suits her terrifically. And her figure looks incredibly sleek in this dress.

See, starlets? This is how it's done. [Well, aside from the tanner thing. Maybe don't do that part. Your skin looks perfectly lovely in its natural state.] She is not wearing leggings. She is not wearing formal shorts. She is not layering twenty different things in the vain hope that the rest of the world will see it and decide to copy. She is not spilling out of her top, not wearing Uggs to a premiere, not peering at the cameras through pupils that won't focus. And every time I re-read that sentence, my eyes play a joke on me and process it as, "She's not peeing at the camera," and although that concept is ridiculous, I'm thrilled to report that she's not doing that, either. She doesn't look as if she smells like two days ago. She doesn't look desperate; just devastating. She's a 48-year old hottie who isn't trying to run away from her age, nor is she giving in to it.

Well played, Jamie Lee. Well played indeed.