Being Beautiful is Such A Bore

Beauty's a doubtful good, a glass, a flower/lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour...

William Shakespeare said that.

I'm currently obsessing about my eyebrows. I impulsively had them waxed today (by a young woman whose own truncated eyebrows should have been a red flag) and she left me practically bald -- I have skinny little lines now where my eyebrows used to be -- and I'm trying to fill them in with pencil, but it somehow just evokes the look of a ghoulish movie star from the 1930s. What WAS I thinking? Fortunately, they grow back fast, but in the meantime, I'm going to have to wear bangs and sunglasses or stay in the house.

I know. It's a stupid problem. I have friends who have lost hair from chemotherapy. People are suffering in Iraq and starving in Africa. (Heck, even Paris Hilton is in jail.) But sometimes I'm just shallow. Can I be shallow for a few minutes here?

The truth is, I spent my entire adolescence worrying about the way I looked. And I wasn't alone. My girlfriends and I were forever fretting about our weight, our skin, our hair, every exterior aspect of ourselves. We were brutal in our self-assessments. And how could it have been otherwise? We were programmed that way. The culture was designed to promote a deadly mix of vanity and insecurity -- and it took.

(That's me...with ample eyebrows...late 1970s)

"Being beautiful is such a bore," said Jacqueline Bisset. I read that quote in a magazine back in the sixties or seventies, and I found it supremely annoying. It seemed a sort of snobbishness to dismiss the importance of physical beauty, that quality which all of us coveted, simply because you were lucky enough to possess it.

But in my own way I too blossomed, and looking good opened doors for me. In 1971, for example, I landed a job as a front-desk receptionist in a moderately glitzy office in downtown Chicago where I got to dress up in tight knit dresses and high heel shoes to answer phones and serve coffee to the men. A stranger kissed me in an elevator once and handed me his card-- if I called him, he would take me out to dinner. (Is that called "meet cute" in the movies?) An elderly man in Bermuda shorts followed me home one afternoon and offered me a job modeling lingerie for him in his apartment. I was fervently courted by an alcoholic professor in Syracuse who dialed me up in the wee hours of morning to speak his sweet slurred nothings. A couple of local cops even invited me for a customized late night cruise in their squad car. Somehow I resisted these, and so many other, intriguing prospects. (Okay. I did date the professor for awhile. I thought he might be an intellectual or something.)

I detested the kind of attention I seemed to elicit in those days, but it was the only evidence I had that I was attractive, or that I had any value at all. Maybe I was beautiful, but I never really believed it, and if beauty gives you some kind of power, I never knew how to use that power to my advantage. I sadly neglected the things that mattered most and spent many years just floundering around. It was a long time ago. The voice of feminism was barely a whisper in my ear, and I had plenty of my own special baggage to sort out.

So yes, being beautiful is a bore. It simply isn't enough when it's all a person has, and it's always a mistake to rely on it. The irony is, by the time you really ease into your skin, you're already past your prime.

And I like to think I've transcended all that superficial nonsense, but sometimes those old habits click into gear, even at 56, when to care too much about your looks becomes pathetic.

So you care just enough. You update the eye make-up and buy a bra that works. You stay out of the juniors' department, even if they do have cuter clothes. You tell yourself you're wiser, you're grateful you can pedal up a hill, and you pull yourself together as best you can. Eventually, you manage to get a little confidence back.

And then, damn it, someone eradicates your eyebrows.