IF YOU'RE 50, DON'T SETTLE FOR LESS THAN FABULOUS.

Byline: Carol Bidwell Daily News Staff Writer

Think orthopedic shoes, house dresses with aprons, hairnets, gray hair.

Arrggghhhhh!

That's the reaction that image of your grandmother or great-grandmother elicits from Linda Stasi and Rosemary Rogers, two New York writers who are determined never to become little old ladies.

Even though they're 50.

They know the angst of looking in the mirror and seeing lines that weren't there yesterday. Of seeing firsthand that gravity really does exist.

But they also know that there's a lot of fun still to be had, and that just because you are 50, that doesn't mean you have to look 50. Or think the way 50-year-olds in housedresses used to think.

They share their off-center view of getting older in ``Boomer Babes'' (St. Martin's Press; $12.95), a silly but oh-so-true book that details many of the things women face as they age.

Like hormone replacement therapy (``Menopause is not, repeat not a disease''); gray hair (``If you look good with gray hair, you'll look spectacular as a blonde''); makeup tricks (``Nobody blushes in mauve or tan''); cosmetic surgery (``If you really want to see what you'd look like with a face lift ... lie on your back and hold a hand mirror in front of your face'').

They also lend humor to not-so-funny topics such as divorce, the empty-nest syndrome, having grown kids move back in and having to care for your own aging parents.

But getting old doesn't necessarily have to be a drag, the two believe. In fact, it can be the adventure of a woman's life - especially for baby boomers.

``We're the drugs, sex and rock 'n' roll generation, and we ain't goin' down without a fight,'' vowed Stasi, a former columnist for Newsday and the Village Voice and an on-camera contributing editor for TV's ``Inside Edition.''

``We made it OK to be single mothers. We made it OK to be CEOs. We made it OK to do whatever we wanted to do, and now we're going to make it OK to be 50.''

Baby-boomer women were the first to break out of the traditional Donna Reed/good-girl mold, said Rogers, executive producer and founding partner of a music production company.

``We kept doing things that were not expected of us,'' she said. ``Women our age were the first not to pay attention to the traditional life milestones: You have to get married by 20, have a child by 28, have grandchildren by 40, and 50 was the beginning of the end - or the end of the beginning. Now, we can do what we want. If I wanted to marry a 30-year-old, or never get married, who cares?''

The two women - who met years ago when both were single mothers, each raising a daughter in the same New York apartment building - became friends largely because of their off-center sense of humor.

When Rogers was approached by a publisher to write a book on women coping with midlife career changes, she considered including Stasi, who's now a free-lance writer. But after the two commiserated at length about turning 50 within months of each other, Rogers junked the first idea and the two decided that a humorous book about getting older would be a lot more fun to write.

``Most books about getting older are so serious,'' Stasi said. ``Ours is a self-help book, and the best way to cure yourself of anything is to laugh. Rosemary and I like to laugh all the time anyway.''

What's so funny about turning 50?

How about that sinking feeling the day you open your mailbox and find AARP's magazine, Modern Maturity, staring you in the face? Stasi and Rogers were horrified - so horrified they traveled to the AARP headquarters in Washington, D.C., to find out how the organization had gotten their names and birthdates.

``We really went there to see, how do we get off the list,'' Stasi said. ``What do you do if you have a younger boyfriend and this comes in the mail? Your cover is blown.''

Bad news on both counts: AARP officials wouldn't say how they got the age-revealing information. And they told the pair that there's virtually no way of evading the advocacy organization's publications.

``There's nothing you can do to get off the list,'' Staci said dejectedly.

So the two writers have turned their efforts in another direction, trying to bolster the image of 50-something women so advertisers, TV programmers and others will stop aiming their products at 18- to 34-year-olds.

``We invented that demographic and, although it once may have been true that women that age had the most disposable income, it's certainly not true anymore,'' Stasi said. ``They're pitching to the wrong audience. There's 20 million women in this age group, and if you ignore us, you're going to be sorry.''

The fact that today's 50-something women have their own careers and their own incomes - rather than being ``career girls'' until they can land a husband - is the major reason they're no longer wearing shirtwaist dresses and waiting in the kitchen for Beaver's dad to come home from work.

``A lot of it has to do with financial independence,'' Rogers said. ``We have our own money, not our husbands' money, and we can do what we want with it. That makes us the most independent women in history.''

That's not to say that turning 50 still isn't a milestone to the women who once attended sock hops, swooned over Elvis and wanted to grow up to be just like Doris Day.

Both Stasi and Rogers admit that reaching the Big 5-0 was an event.

``You can't pretend that you're not looking at it with some sort of dread,'' Stasi said. ``But you can make yourself feel better about it. Do something you've never done before - and don't think about being an old lady.''

Get the Babe state of mind

Thoughts on aging from the ``Boomer Babes'':

On exercise: ``You can't live without it - unless you want to look like Mama Cass.''

On the buff workout mavens at the gym: ``You must realize that they don't work, are really shallow and, deep down, desperately unhappy.''

On hairstyle changes: ``If your hair looks anything like your picture ... in any yearbook, you are in big trouble.''

On picking a man: ``There's a lot to be said for older men. For one thing, you'll always be young to him.''

On dating a younger man: ``A younger man is like a hit of estrogen without bothering to visit the gynecologist.''

On marriage: ``Never marry a man before he's had at least one midlife crisis. Never get married again unless you've had at least one of your own.''

On having fun: ``If you never did anything or went anywhere, you'd be wrinkle-free all right, but you'd also be a big nun.''

On attitude, ours and theirs: ``Our 50 is not Barbara Bush's 50, and we will never be as old as she was at 40.''

On coping with AARP mail: ``Burn the AARP mail like you did your bra and like you did your boyfriends' draft cards. If you don't, you are not a boomer babe and never will be.''

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Photo, Box

Photo: Rosemary Rogers, left, and Linda Stasi write about staying young at age 50 in ``Boomer Babes.''

Box: Get the Babe state of mind (See Text)