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The Benefits of Aging With Grace: Dana Bowman (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of Dana Bowman’s talk titled “The Benefits of Aging With Grace” at TEDxUTulsa 2025 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Gray Hair Incident

My talk begins with a story about how my gray hair made a woman mad. So I was at the store about four months into my gray hair journey and an acquaintance spied me from down the aisle and she did that, you know, tilty head, smiley thing and started to approach. Then she got up to me and she leaned in and she said, “Your hair.” I smiled back because there’d been a lot of smiling involved at this point and she leaned in a little further and she said, “How could you do that to your hair?” Now my hair and I had just gotten back from a book trip in New York. We’d been on television, we’d done radio, we’d done podcasts. We were out, so to speak.

It was like my own silver hair cotillion and I thought we were doing okay, but then she leaned in yet one more time and she said, “How could you do that to yourself?” Incidentally, or perhaps not so, her hair was the same color as mine. In 2014, I got sober and the Dana pre-2014 would have responded to this whole incident differently. I probably would have said something self-effacing and I might have even apologized because that was my thing back then. You know, the questions in that aisle had seemed kind of angry and you say sorry when you make somebody mad, right? But instead, I processed and I looked at her and I said, “Because I like it, I think it looks nice.”

And I would have added, “I am the silver fox,” but I think we had established that there wasn’t much of a sense of humor going on in that aisle, so I let it go.