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Debbie Allen thinks everyone should stop worrying about aging.
“Just live,” Allen tells Julia Louis-Dreyfus on the latest episode of the Wiser Than Me podcast. The award winning podcast from Lemonada Media features 63-year-old Dreyfus interviewing iconic older women in the world of entertainment and pop culture. (Previous episodes have included guests Sally Field and Jane Fonda.)
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Allen, the 74-year-old award winning producer, director, writer, actor, choreographer and grandmother of two, says she feels 25 and is just getting better with age.
“If you live a life like I've lived and you are healthy and you have all your faculties, you only get sharper. …You get better at what you do, and you get more economical with where you spend your time, and you're more effective in really great ways,” Allen says.
Allen, who narrated AARP’s 2023 documentary The Hidden Power of Purpose, says she’s happy to talk about her age even though many women “curl up and go into a corner” when age is mentioned.
“I don't even know why. They should be so happy – people are dying left and right, and we are living. We woke up vertical, child. Calm down, wake the hell up,” she says.
Allen inherited this go-getter personality from her mother, a 1952 Pulitzer Prize nominee who turns 101 in July. When Allen was 9 years old in 1959, her mother moved her and her sister to Mexico in order to escape the segregated South.
In Mexico, where there “was no racial segregation,” the world opened up for Allen: She was able to go into theaters and take dance classes.
“We were able to be people, not Black people in segregated white America,” Allen says.
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