Bashed But Not Trashed

Author Aphrodite Phoenix is a young-looking grandma. She's into healthy living, and it's working. Her true age, when told, is amazing.

But she also radiates the understanding you'd expect from someone who remembers exactly where she was the day JFK was gunned down. Or from the mother of a filmmaker who ran south with his camera to the mass grave in lower Manhattan, on that morning. Or from the grandmother of the babies of a crackhead.

Phoenix has been around.

She's been a desperately poor s...