Telling her life story — naked onstage — was the only way.
That much, Pamela Redmond was sure of.
It was a sweltering July afternoon last year and Redmond was sitting on the sofa in her Hollywood home stewing over how AI was nearly putting her out of business. At 72, she had published 20 books, seven of them works of fiction, and she’d even sold one novel, “Younger,” as a hit television series. She was the founder of the largest baby naming website online which, as a single divorcee, was her lifeline financially (and meant to be her retirement). But AI had scraped her website’s content and used it to rank itself higher in search results; her company’s revenue had plummeted by about half and she’d had to let employees go.
“I thought: What can I bring to the conversation that AI can’t?” Redmond says. “And then it came to me: a body!”
She felt compelled to create an in-person experience that was distinctly human — something true and personal — the antithesis of the digitally-saturated, fragmented and ephemeral world we live in, where truth is often opaque. Though she had zero theatrical experience, not even in a high school musical, theater is what came to mind.
“I decided I wanted to tell the story of my life, as told by my body. That’s how I came up with a one-woman show, ‘Old Woman Naked.’”
Pamela Redmond, right, chats with Los Angeles Times writer Deborah Vankin about her solo show, “Old Woman Naked.”
Telling me this, Redmond is sitting in a hot tub, nude, at Wi Spa in Koreatown. As am I. Because interviewing Redmond — naked in an intimate setting — seemed the best way to have a personal conversation about such a revealing topic. We’ve been friends for several years and it made sense to visit the Korean spa, at which we both feel comfortable.
Redmond sinks deeper into the steaming bath, the water level rising to her decolletage, leaving her face flushed as beads of sweat drip down the curve of her neck.
“Old Woman Naked” is about Redmond, but it’s also about being in a woman’s body, in America, at a certain time — from the pre-internet, ‘50s and ‘60s until today. Redmond performed it for one night only in New York City at the Laurie Beechman Theatre in October, directed and produced by Janice Maffei — just 10 weeks after she had conceived of it. The show opens April 29 in Los Angeles at the Broadwater in Hollywood for three nights, directed by Jennifer Chambers (“POTUS”). Kate Juergens and Jenn Gerstenblatt, both formerly of ABC Family, produced it.
In the hour-long performance, Redmond stands on a bare stage and tells intimate stories she hasn’t shared with anyone until now, not even her former husband of 33 years, her three children or her best girlfriends. She tells of her first stirrings of lust while she was growing up in Norwood, N.J., sparked by the desire to touch her best girlfriend’s breasts; she tells of being a 19-year-old child bride and how her new father-in-law took her to a strip club shortly after the wedding; she tells of her jealous first husband who, when she tried to leave him, held a knife to her throat and tried to rape her.
But she also tells of the thrill, and all-consuming love, tangled up in having children; of creative reinvention and late-life success publishing a novel at 50, creating an internet company at 55 and selling a book as a TV show at 60; and of the absolute freedom she felt after menopause, when she could no longer have children and her body, at long last, belonged only to her.
Pamela Redmond performs “Old Woman Naked” in New York in October 2025. (Scott Hoffmann)
As Redmond performs these stories during the show, she takes off her clothing, piece by piece, often cleverly stitched into the storytelling. At 11 years old, she explains onstage, she was desperate to wear a bra. “Now I feel like I’m 11, but with a drawer full of bras I never want to wear,” she reveals, letting the undergarment drop to the ground. By the end of the show, Redmond is facing the audience entirely naked.
Ultimately, that moment is the point of the show: proudly bringing an image that’s been culturally steeped in taboo and shame — that of an older woman’s bare body, with all its folds and dimples and curves — into the light.
“I wanted to show people what an older woman’s body actually looked like,” Redmond says. “Young women take their clothes off all the time, they’re scantily dressed onstage or using their body and their sexuality as part of their art. But older women — it’s just not seen. Or it’s seen as ugly. I knew right away: This is intrinsically different and kind of radical.”
Even as she was researching the show, Redmond became increasingly aware of the extent to which older women’s nude bodies “have been so hidden away.”
“There is so little art, so little pop culture [showing it],” she says. “I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the fourth-largest museum in the world, and searched their archives and there are six images from all of history. In the Louvre [in Paris], there are three drawings that show old women naked — and they’re grotesque. Representation is really important. It matters.”
Pamela Redmond, right, tells Times writer Deborah Vankin that she felt “on fire” writing her solo show. “I wanted to show people what an older woman’s body actually looked like.”
Redmond says she wasn’t nervous about being nude in front of a live audience. “I’ve been through so many things in my life that have been kind of harrowing,” she says. “I was scared about not remembering my lines. That terrified me!” But Redmond doesn’t consider herself an exhibitionist, either. She’s had a love-hate relationship with her body throughout her lifetime, she says. “You know, gaining and losing the same 40 pounds over and over.”
At one moment in the show, Redmond shows an overhead slide of herself at 22, posing for an artist friend, nude. She looks up at the image, admitting: “Look at me, I was a goddess. I had no idea. I thought I was fat, unfashionably curvy and unattractive.”
If there is a message to the show, Redmond says, it’s that “you are the sum of everything you’ve been and everything you’ve done. And to see yourself not just as this old body but as someone who’s lived this incredibly rich life in this body that has taken you through this incredible range of experiences.”
“Old Woman Naked” hit a nerve that night in New York, Redmond says. Audience members — mostly women, older and younger — came up to her afterward and revealed personal stories they hadn’t told anyone to date. Other women said they were inspired by the play or felt they’d been given newfound freedom to be themselves.
Redmond has since fleshed out the Los Angeles version of the show, going deeper into stories and punching up the jokes.
She also sees “Old Woman Naked” as a much bigger creative gesture than a limited run solo show. She hopes to write a book expanding on the ideas in the show and, separately, self-publish the script to sell in the theater lobby, afterward. She’s thinking about a titular podcast, in which she’d interview women of different ages about their bodies and their lives. And she’s working with a theater director to develop the script of “Old Woman Naked” for a celebrity to star in.
Pamela Redmond, left, relaxes with Times writer Deborah Vankin at Wi Spa in Koreatown.
“I see it as Jessica Lange on Broadway,” Redmond says. “It’s like stealth feminism: They come for the nudity, they leave with their views of women’s bodies totally revolutionized. I want this to be a bigger conversation about women, aging, bodies, humanity, owning our individuality and uniqueness — and celebrating that.”
So what does Redmond see now, when she looks at her body in the mirror?
“I think I look great. I like what I see. I like my smile,” she says. “I’m good.”
Stepping out into the sunlit parking lot after our spa day, that smile is on full display.
“That was so fun,” Redmond says. “Our conversation — everything we talked about — it’s different when you’re naked, it really is. You’re just more open, more vulnerable.”
She takes a seat in the shade, waiting for the valet to bring her car.
“It’s the same with the show, the conversation I wanted to have with the audience. That’s why it had to be: ‘Old Woman Naked.’”
“Old Woman Naked” plays at the Broadwater, in Hollywood, April 29-30 and May 17. Tickets: $35.
