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She did it again! She stepped right up there in front of God and everybody and said, "here I am, this is what I look like and it's ok" Jamie Lee Curtis that is. In case you haven't heard, she posed for the cover of AARP's May/June 08 issue...........topless. Yes, you heard me. She's fifty and she's topless on the cover of a magazine. God I love that woman.

I honestly didn't think my opinion of her could get any higher when she posed in More Magazine in 2002. Tired of perpetuating an image that suggested she was flawless and beautiful all the time with no effort at all, Jamie Lee Curtis stripped down to a sports bra and spandex shorts to show the entire world her beautiful imperfections.

I was ecstatic, as were millions of other women around the country. How many of us have been fighting the notion that we just don't measure up to that runway-modelsize-0 image, with porcelain skin, and a perfect body?

Who hasn't looked at the images on magazine covers of ageless women, glowing with eternal youth, only to sigh with a measure of discontent and perhaps even despair; knowing that our ordinary lives with our ordinary bodies, complete with cellulite, chubby bellies and sagging chests, could never measure up to that impossible standard?

And so, we slog out of those stores feeling inadequate and unacceptable, knowing it is a battle we will never win. For who could ever achieve a standard of beauty that is based entirely upon airbrushed illusion? And now, who couldn't admire a woman in an industry that markets a fictitious ideal of beauty, who gives us permission to be exactly the way we are?

Jamie Lee Curtis has made it her mission it seems, to tell women that what is beautiful is who we already are. Without a doubt, unconditional, self-acceptance is a beauty standard far more worthy to strive for. Jamie Lee embraces herself with a dignity and self respect that only seems to increase with each passing year, each additional gray hair, and each line that etches itself upon her face, saying that at fifty, "she has more confidence than ever in her looks."

"I think I have finally found what I hope beauty is, or at least, beauty as it applies to me. I agree with my husband (film funnyman Christopher Guest), who once pointed out Jessica Tandy, gray-haired and dressed in a simple dress, as the most beautiful woman in a roomful of glammed-up celebrities. That's beauty,'"

Moreover, Jamie said that when she posed for AARP she wanted to tell women "I'm posing topless at 50 to show older women they can still be beautiful'"

And in deed we can. At fifty, like Jamie, we can embrace the richness of our life's experiences, always remembering to be thankful for the years that have given it to us. We can proudly forge ahead in the years to come, not looking back at a lost youth, but looking forward, with an expectation that each passing year, will reward us with a beauty that is rooted in self-acceptance and a genuine love for who we have become.

Jamie Lee Curtis sets a wonderful example of how we should encourage one another as women. Rather than measuring ourselves with a yardstick of a fleeting and unattainable beauty, let us put one foot in front of the other, with our heads held high with a self-possession and poise that only fifty years on this earth can give. Let us also celebrate a beauty that can never be bought, but only earned and acquired through knowing and accepting who we really are. Can I hear an AMEN!

Learn more about this author, Magnolia Miller.
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