Leanne Morgan says she was so cute in the eighties, but I want her to know she is beautiful now.
Part Mae West, part Mee-maw, at sixty she rocks an ankle-length shirtdress like a Bob Mackie gown and smokes her jokes like a pack-a-day habit of Virginia Slims. She’s got it, so she flaunts it. She’s sassy and she knows it. She is a professional all-natural consummate flirt. But the sexiest and most inviting thing about her is that she is a hoot.
Every story she tells, she tells like she’s letting us in on a secret. She’s addicted to white flour and sugar. She’s afraid of summer. She feels empathy for Taylor Swift’s aching uterus and Def Leppard being forced to play night shows well into their sixties. Menopause is upon her like a panther in the night and she has hot flashes, night sweats, and mood swings that make her want to commit murder. She has plantar fasciitis and a hernia she mistook for backed-up poop. She is college educated but learned all she really needs to know from The Young and the Restless. She shares her bed with a man who—despite thirty-some years of marriage, two mattress-hog dogs, and a thermostat set as cold as a Piggly Wiggly freezer aisle—still wants to get it on. To buy her kids a trampoline for Christmas or make it to church on time, she says, “I prostitute myself to my husband.” How thrifty is he? When Leanne tours, she splits a hotel room with her grown daughter, who does her makeup, and the two sleep butt to butt.
Leanne’s relaxed in her delivery. She’s told these ones before. But now she’s at an age where she’s comfortable enough to pause for laughs and allow them to wash over her as if she’s bobbing in the Gulf in her Lands’ End swim dress.
I’m fifty-five and I want Leanne to know that at our age, when most women are getting used to being ignored, overlooked, and underestimated, I see her. I hear her. But most of all, I am rooting for her.
I want to see her make out with Tim Daly on her very own Netflix show. I want to see her walk out onto the Emmy stage and get a kiss blown to her from Pedro Pascal. Would I like to see her host the Oscars? Yes. Would I like to see her as the face of, as Mama used to say, “Ess-tee–law-dee”? You bet. Would I buy a hypothetical bottle of Yummy, a perfume named after her favorite word that smells like passionflowers and freshly washed bedsheets hung out on the line? Get me on a waitlist. I am so in favor of whatever Leanne is selling, if she got a brand deal with estradiol, I’d buy a pair of peekaboo jeans and show off my hormone replacement patch like a thong.
“Y’all have been darling,” she says to her audiences in a Tennessee accent that’s deeper than the sausage buckets at her parents’ meat processing plant. “Y’all have been precious!”
These are words my mama said to me, and I say to my niece and my nephew and to an alarming number of sweet strangers in New York City as I grow older, because Leanne and I are cut from the same patchwork quilt. We are aging Southern women who are tickled to be here. Here on earth, here with you. Grateful and thankful. And not embarrassed to let it all hang out.
Want more laughs? Find more stories from our comedy issue:
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>> Six Razor-Sharp Southern Comedians Who Are Keeping Us in Stitches
>> Five Comedy Clubs to Seek Out
