Invitation from Joy: if you are in the Omaha area, you are invited to:

The launch party of BOOB Girls IV: Murder at Meadow Lakes
Sunday, July 22, 1-4pm
The Bookworm, 87^th and Pacific
When the girls watch the evolution of vampire movies in Hadley’s apartment, they eat popcorn with M&Ms and goldfish crackers while drinking cheap champaign.
We will serve the same. Come! Laugh, get hugs and pick up the new book.

 The Girls Check in to the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the Elderly and Beautiful

 All four of them, Hadley, Robbie, Mary Rose and Marge Aaron, the newest BOOB girl, hurried to refill their diet sodas and get to their favorite table in the movie theater lobby.

 “I think it was the best movie on aging ever!” Mary Rose McGill said, a little too loudly.

 “I loved it when Judi Dench was on her way to the airport and she told her sons she’d found the Marigold Hotel in India on the ‘interweb.’”

 “Oh,” Mary Rose said. “I’m Judi Dench in that movie. Look how she changed. She’s me, for Pete’s sake, going from a meek little wife who did everything her husband said to being a strong, independent woman with a job when she’s old.” Mary Rose brushed back her dyed blonde hair and took off her red-rimmed glasses.

 Hadley smiled. “I’m Maggie Smith. I was Maggie when she was Professor McGonagall in Harry Potter and,” then she started to think. “No, I’m not Maggie in this one. She was so stubborn and prejudiced, but what a woman! And she changed, too.”

 Marge sipped her drink. “I most of all related to how their children treated them. We really didn’t see the children at all except when the boys took Judi to the airport. But when she called a son from Jaipur and he scolded her for not realizing the time difference and woke him up,” she took a breath and shook her head. “He was unkind to her, when all she wanted  was hear his voice.”

“I have an unkind daughter, “Mary Rose said. “She points her finger and scolds me and I wonder just who she is sometimes. I would love to have a best-friend daughter.”

 “But look at how it showed us about aging,” Hadley said, not wanting to mention her son who was on his fourth marriage”

 Marge leaned forward, “It was what Judi Dench said, something about if you just stand in the ocean, a wave can hit you and knock you down. But if you dive in, you may swim through to the other side.” She smiled. “Denying you’re growing older is like the one woman who wouldn’t go outside the hotel, who was afraid of everything and hated where she was. She refused to see the color or the romance of newness.”

 They nodded.

 Hadley picked up on it. “Yes! If you deny aging, try to stop it, eventually it will knock you down. But if you admit it, dive into it and realize the adventure and dignity it brings, you can come out all right.”

 Marge reached over and touched Hadley’s arm. “Reminds me of what Sonny, the young Indian landlord kept saying, ‘Everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right now, then it’s not the end.’ I want to remember that.”

 Robinson Leary grinned. “The men in it were good, too. Great old actors whose names we didn’t know but whose faces were all familiar. And how about the romance? I loved it when the lady old Norman fell in love with said he brought two pills with him on their first night together.”

 “But she didn’t want it that way, so when they fell out of his pocket,” Hadley broke in, then pointed back at Robbie.

 “She substituted and he went all night on two aspirins.”

 “I am so going to see this movie again,” Mary Rose said. And they all nodded.

Note from Joy: Marv and I both recommend The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel to everybody over 60.

It’s a movie you won’t soon forget.