Fuck this Aging Gracefully shit!

Exhibit A: Joan Collins, who at 72, still looks good enough to eat and recently took the 40-something hottie at right to husband.

Exhibit B: Shirley Bassey, 68, (below), who was awarded Damehood in 2000, probably because she’s the High Priestess of drag queens everywhere, thanks to her big, bossy renditions of such affirmations of identity as This is My Life ("and I don’t give a DAMN for lost emotion!") and I Am What I Am.

Not only do these old gals look great, they continue to create sparks with their unending critique of everyone and every- thing that crosses their path. Just the sort of Diva Trash Talk that makes our hearts go pitter-pat.

A Diva Stands in No One’s Shadow!
As these Exhibits will show. First Joan, then Shirley.

Aptly dubbed "Diva-licious" for the bedroom-eyed bitch goddess (right) she played on Dynasty (now available on a four-disc DVD set that is surely headed for the Smithsonian’s permanent collection), Joan Collins has lately, under her new, self-described title of "Writer," become a public scold.

In a semi-regular column for the Daily Mail, she huffs and puffs over the state of the world, recently lecturing a young actress (Jude Law’s fiancee) for missing a stage performance just because she was having troubles at home (Jude had snagged the nanny on a pool table — which , by the way, immediately went on auction at eBay):

"The Show Must Go On," soared Joan. "It’s a mantra that we repeat through the tears, the headaches, the hangovers and the tragedies that often befall us."

To miss a performance, she wrote, was worse than unprofessional, it broke "the contract between the actor and the audience." Actors had an "almost social duty" to provide the public "a chance to escape from the realities of the world for a few hours." Personal problems must never interfere with the civic responsibility that was a 7:30 curtain call.

Actors, further declared the Diva, who was about to work the London bombings into this mega guilt-trip, needed that "peculiarly British trait of stiff upper lip and Blitz spirit, now being shown by the people of London … They are refusing to be diverted from their daily lives and thus not only demonstrate their defiance of terrorists, but also subvert their purpose …

"The show," she boomed to what surely must have been a deeply shamed, shattered and near suicidal young actress, "goes on!"

As does our Joan. In last Thursday’s column, she decried "the horrible, encroaching decay" of good manners in the U. K. "where traditional virtues of male chivalry and female propriety [are] very far from view." (Female propriety being very much on view four years ago when Joan was camping it up on stage in a white corset and 16th Century ringlets.)

Case in point: "My husband Percy and I were at a ball at the Grosvenor House Hotel … As Percy held the door open to let me through, a 6ft tall, middle-aged, horse-faced male pushed past me, trod on the hem of my dress and rushed outside to climb into the taxi that the doorman had waiting for us."

Not since the daughter of mobster John Gotti, Victoria Gotti, was writing a weekly column for the New York Post has there been such a screamy must-read.

But let’s pull ourselves away from The Adventures of Joan and head fearlessly out into Bassey Country.

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