What was your mother's "getting ready" ritual?

My mom would get ready wearing her bra and slip and I always remember the kleenex afterwards with lips on it from the lipstick she blotted.

Her routine had a name. It was called “I’m Putting on My Face”

She put this crap called Second Debt on her face, then foundation , “rouge” and red lipstick.

If her hair was a mess, she plopped a hat Joan Crawford style...she never went out in rollers...she would die before she went out looking like a slob

Rubbing her clit using the flat part of her hand for about 10 minutes

She would sacrifice a live goat to Baphomet.

Then she'd be refreshed and energized and ready to go!

First, she'd tuck while I handed her the duct tape.

I can still remember by mom stuffing herself into her girdle and dousing herself with Aqua-Net and Estee Lauder perfume. Thank Christ she didn't smoke or the whole neighborhood would have gone up in flames.

Before my mother quit committing fully to her preparations for the evening, she would emulate early-60s homemaker but with wicked red lips. But her favorite look was 20s chic, a clean line with a hint of flapper. If a hat a fun one.

I just realized It was her mother's era and clothes she looked to the most, even if updated. Grandma was devoted to her appearance and wardrobe, and her daughters saw her simple vanities as the acme of glamour.

White diamonds perfume. Cover girl on the lips and face.

“Promise her anything, but give her Arpege.”

[quote] "What was your mother's "getting ready" ritual?"

I wouldn't know. I made it a point NOT to follow my mother into the bathroom.

I remember once when I was about 4, secretly slipping one of the clip on earrings she planned to wear that night into my mouth hoping that it would mean she wouldn't be able to go.

But she just put on another pair...

[quote] “Promise her anything, but give her Arpege.”

SHIT!!

A lot of vinegar, water, and a 15lb douche bag. Especially if the boys down by the dock had gotten paid that day. She knew she was going to make some $$$ that night.

Haha, R12!

My mom would sit under the helmet-style hair dryer, reading a magazine and drinking one whisky and soda. I would talk with her at the bathroom door while she took out her rollers and styled her curls. She smelled of Wind Song perfume back then.

Bump

Stockings were hard to come by, mother would paint her pale legs with cola, and I was assigned the task of drawing the seams at the back of her legs. I remember using a dark brown waxy pencil. I had a jittery hand as a child, so the results were not so great.

Sitting at the dresser, she’d first put on Oil of Olay (Ulan?) and I can still remember that smell. Next was a Revlon liquid foundation, eye shadow, and always pink lipstick (Desert or Dusky Rose?). Then came the lashings of VO5 hairspray, and a generous spray of Charlie to finish.

^Mary!!!! That’s the gayest thing I’ve ever heard. Did she also have you trim her snatch and stretch out her new high heels?

^ R19 is for R17

I remember mother getting ready for the death squad to carry her off by screaming in terror till she cried tears of blood which then streamed down her face becoming a grisly kind of rouge on her hollow cheeks.

R19 As opposed to all the terrifically macho replies that came before it...

[quote]Then came the lashings of VO5 hairspray,

Right down the throat, I hope!

This thread is making me THIRSTY as HELL!

I never witnessed my mother "getting ready". She was pretty much always well put together for any occasion. But on the occasions she and my father were going out to some really fancy event she would retire to her bedroom, door closed and no one (including my father) would see her until she was fully adorned. She and my father always had separate bedrooms and bathrooms next to each other with a doorway they could pass through between them. I grew up in a very old fashioned household. One thing that was strictly frowned on was displaying yourself not fully dressed in front of others, even family members.

I didn't watch the ritual. The brands included: Clinique makeup and Estée Lauder perfumes. My mom was pretty until she got sick of being a stay at home mom. She "ran away from home" 2 times one year and I guess that produced the OK from my dad for her to go to work. She then stopped being so ornamental. Now I knew other working moms in my neighborhood and among my friends and some working moms were super glamorous career gals with heavy makeup and beautiful clothes but not my mom. Work allowed her to let that go.

[quote]I grew up in a very old fashioned household. One thing that was strictly frowned on was displaying yourself not fully dressed in front of others, even family members.

You were raised right!

The first time I put on my mother's makeup, I broke her lipstick and she asked my sister if she had been trying on Mommy's makeup. When she said no, she clutched her bosom in horror realizing it was her 8 year old son, me. She caught me again (I was extra careful and didn't break anything so I don't know how she figured it out) and the next thing I knew my gay ass was sitting in the waiting room of a child psychologist.

My mother never wore make up unless she was going somewhere special and she got dressed up. Then it was pressed powder from a compact, rouge from a smaller compact, and lipstick. Red lipstick. But she got her hair done once a week well up into her late 80's. Never wore eye make up, and thought dying your hair was for sluts.

My mother always had on Match Game or Tattletales, or some other game show, on TV while she sat at her glamorous makeup table. I would sit in a big chair close to her and we would watch it together and laugh at the banter between Richard Dawson, Brett Somers and Charles Nelson-Reilly. Life was so carefree and innocent back then. I miss it greatly.

She'd often lie on her chaise lounge, smoking and reading The Morrow Guide to Knots.

If you mean getting ready for dad's drunken foraging after the kiddies went to sleep, it was one or two Gin Martinis and maybe a valium.

My mom teased the fuck out of her hair, put on black eyeliner and mascara, dark red lipstick, and Chanel No. 5, and then put on something tight with black lace. She reminded me of Elizabeth Taylor.

R32 - 1960s Liz or 1980s Liz?

Hahaha 60s! My mom never let herself get fat, even after 3 kids. She was too vain.

R34 - Good to hear. I was picturing Divine in Kabuki makeup and fishnets.

Early on my mother had beautiful skin and only wore lipstick. Sunbathing changed that. She often had a poodle cut and kept styling to a minimum.

Mostly I remember her hats with veils; she dressed well because my father wouldn't have it any other way when they went out. He was a drunk and didn't care day-to-day how she dressed.

She wore Here's My Heart perfume and other Avon scents.

At some point she fell into the 1950s/60s housewife trap and spent her days on diet pills and valium. It was so confusing for me. I loved her in spite of all of that.

We didn’t have much money when I was a kid. We didn’t live on a farm or in a trailer park, but we were decidedly beyond the limits of the suburbs in coastal Maine. We didn’t live in some cul-de-sac funded by the GI Bill — there wasn’t euchre on Friday nights or supper clubs on Saturday evenings. I don’t really remember my parents “going out”. If they ever did it was once or twice a year for dinner, just the two of them, at one of the town’s sad restaurants. For one of those seldom special occasions, my mom wore her finest drugstore lipstick and blush without many other adornments. I think her only splurge was a bottle of Shalamar which seemed to last a decade in our medicine cabinet.

I still miss my mother a lot, and my father too. But I don’t really have a lot of those sensory memories to cherish that I see a lot of other eldergays here talk about. Sometimes when a catch a whiff of 70/30 ground beef frying up it reminds me of my childhood kitchen (and mom). If I’m ever on a getaway in Provincetown or coastal CT and, walking dockside, I get a whiff of dead fish and gasoline, it makes me melancholy for the memory of my dad.

Mom wasn’t an Elizabeth Arden protege, but she had plenty of other virtues that made her elegant in her own way. I didn’t need to peek through the keyhole of her nonexistent private dressing area to see that. I don’t begrudge any of you guys who recall steam curlers and silk slips. All of that sounds so exotic and inspiring for a budding gayling. The closest I had was reruns of I Love Lucy, and they are still enough to make me feel nostalgic for the good ‘ol days.

R37 We didn't have any money to speak of either. Both my parents worked. She was in the typing pool, at some fabricating factory, and he worked in an auto plant. We lived in a tiny 900 SF tract house, and their idea of a special occasion was a family event like a wedding or anniversary party in the local church hall, a holiday party like Christmas Eve or NYE, maybe some girlfriend's shower or a special first run movie showing downtown, like Ten Commandments, etc. It was a very simple time for working class people like them.

My mother would spend all Saturday mornings at the hairdresser’s getting her big beehive ‘do done—and then come home and spend an actual hour or so in the bathroom rearranging everything because, according to her, the hairdresser hadn’t done it right. This was always quite amusing to me.

Hot curlers, Reba McIntyre, heavy eyeshadow. A lot of times shed be ready and gone out to the bar before I even got home from school. I'd always know if it was a a night she was going out to the bar if I could smell the lingering Charlie perfume she put on before she left. She only wore that perfume when she went out to the bars. One Saturday she was getting ready to go out with one of her boyfriends and I was making dinner when suddenly somebody was pounding on our front door. I opened the door and our neighbor Ruth from across the street was frantically trying to turn on the front hose. As soon as she saw me she yelled go tell your mom the car is on fire and I noticed that our green Chevy hatchback had smoke billowing out the window.

I helped her get the hose on and then we put the fire out which mostly was contained to the passenger seat. She said she saw my 5-year-old brother get out of the car and then the smoke started coming out. It turned out that he had started it on fire to try to prevent my mom from going out that night because he didn't want her to leave.

My mom of course could not let him get his way because then he would learn that he could manipulate her by pulling stunts like this. She had her boyfriend come pick her up and still left my 12 year old self to watch not only him but my two other younger siblings.

Wow, I never knew that Shelley Hack was such an unfit mother.

I have no fucking idea other than that I didn't dare wander into that part of the house because the air was thick with the stink of hairspray for at least a half-hour after.

R37 How lovingly you write. Thanks for sharing that.

Agreed. That was a lovely, touching little essay, R37.

So many of the posters sound like they were raised by Cher's character in Mermaids

Jealous, R45?

tammy fay bakker on the ghetto blaster

Of course I'm jealous.

R40 you have at least one and possibly more novels in you. If you're not writing, you need to start.

gayling zipping up the back of her party dress.

She told me to get the axe.

My mother wore Axe.

I have fond memories of my mother spending hours in front of the mirror, painting on her terrifying clown face.

On social media you've seen 10 years of our mom in her bathrooms. It isn't pretty.

Dippity Do and a swipe of “gee, your lip looks hairless”.

My mother ALWAYS asked me to help her decide what to wear (even to church) and had the nerve to act surprised when I announced that I was gay. Anyway, she’d do her makeup and hair and then choose two or three outfits and model them for me and then we would decide which one she should wear. I wanted to go into fashion, but I didn’t believe in myself back then. Maybe next time.

She’d get out of bed a mess, completely bedraggled. But then a crane would lower her into a huge tank of green liquid. She’d be completely submerged for over five minutes. When she was raised out again, she looked just like Brigitte Bardot in “And God Created Woman.”

[quote] So many of the posters sound like they were raised by Cher's character in Mermaids

I was thinking Joan Crawford's character at the beginning of Berserk.

I understand how you feel, R37. I know there were plenty of problems and injustices in the world then, but I've always thought being white and middle class in 1960s America was probably the best time in history to be alive. But I probably romanticize that time because of all the mid-century sitcom reruns I grew up on.

I never watched my mother get ready. It wasn't my thing.

I grew up in the seventies and mom had spit curls and a bouffant which we called her Barmaid hairdo, we would call it Marge Simpson now, lots of teasing went on and on, until it was high enough, then the hair spray, lots of it, everywhere in the bathroom. She was one of the last real housewives and fixed her hair and put on nice clothes for my Dad before he came home from work, EVERYDAY.

Combed her hair and put on lipstick.

Don't know.

I couldn’t answer this. My mother died a few years before I was born.

R4 OMG! Mine too!

R63 Thank you for the quality contribution.