Naked and unafraid at 73, she's challenging ideas about aging women on a Hollywood stage

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

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.’” 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�...