Salty!

Do you ever think about who you might like to be when you are an old lady? Have you ever considered that you might be best suited for a life as a Salty Old Broad, a la Cloris Leachman? Yes, Cloris Leachman, who is 82, and who, when asked what she would do next with her career (after appearing on Dancing With the Stars, ew), responded thusly:

“I could get pregnant,” she said in an interview in her trailer, where, completely coincidentally, she insisted on changing out of her ballroom gown in front of a reporter. “I’ve got a bit of time before my next project. Maybe I’ll be on ‘American Idol.’ ”

God, Salty Old Broads are the best Broads of all. They get to drink and smoke and say whatever the hell they like because everyone agrees that they are old and kind of crazy. Age gives the Saltiness of the Broad in question a sort of bawdy gravitas; she's seen whippersnappers like you come and go, and she knows that the problem is not that she doesn't take things seriously, but that you assume they should be taken seriously in the first place. The Wife of Bath? That was a salty dame:

He was, I trowe, twenty wynter oold,
And I was fourty, if I shal seye sooth;
But yet I hadde alwey a coltes tooth..
As help me God, I was a lusty oon,
And faire, and riche, and yong, and wel bigon,
And trewely, as myne housbondes tolde me,
I hadde the beste quoniam myghte be.

Yes, "quoniam" means what you think it means. Yes, that is awesome.

There are days when I wake up and feel old and kind of wonder where I am going with my life; then, there are days when I remember the Salty Old Broads of this world, and realize that my most awesome years are yet to come. My only regret: every Salty lass must pass through an inevitable period of Quirky Aggression. Read, friends, and tremble.