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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (July 16, 2004)
HUM OR .............. W .............. he thought first occurred to me as I sat pondering Brad P itts strangfely lineless face in Troy. (N ot to mention his golden thighs.) I swear, the man looked as huffed and polished as a granite countertop. Not that I minded. In fact, I timed my pee breaks carefully during the film s three hours to ensure 1 didn’t miss seeing him naked. But it does bug me that, while I continue to age, the march of time seems to have halted for the Pitt. Either the guy has had work done or he has a portrait rotting in an attic somewhere. I’ve been more aware of aging lately as I’ve noticed that no matter how well-rested I may he, I still look tired all the time. I tell myself the hags under my eyes give me a charming, hangdog quality, like Al Pacino. But I fear I’m really on my way to looking like Keith Richards the morning after. W h at’s more, after by M arc Acito 38 years without any hair loss, I thought I was immune, but the recent com bination of a wet head and over head lighting revealed that my hairline is receding faster than C harlton Heston’s short term memory. I’ve begun experimenting with a little artful rearranging, hut I worry that the trendy Caesar haircut o f today will become the comb-over of tomorrow. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before I start wearing a baseball cap indoors, a fashion choice that makes middle-aged men Botoxic shock T The Gospel According to Marc Who needs plastic surgery? look like movie directors or the cast of You're a G ood Man, C harlie Brown. So I wonder: Is it time I got a little work done myself? I’m very conflicted. O n the one hand, I’m continually dismayed by actors whose face lifts are so tight they don’t need side-view mirrors. It seems to me that one o f the pre requisites for being in moving pictures should he having a face that moves. I was particular ly mortified when Helen Mirren, an actress who has remained defiantly natural all these years, showed up in Raising H elen looking so overly Botoxed it was like she’d been sandblast ed. Perhaps it should have been called Lifting H elen. T here’s just something about that unblinking, apple-cheeked look o f plastic surgery that makes everyone resemble a Japanese anime cartoon. Look at the contestants on The Sw an (if you dare). After under going more renovations than the Sistine Chapel, these women were rendered virtually unrecognizable, not to mention indistinguishable, which leads me to wonder whether one of them is actually Osama bin Laden. (Face it, with plastic surgery being what it is today, bin Laden could be sipping coffee on T V every morning with Regis and none of us would notice.) ften the nipped and tucked just end up looking different instead of better, like Je n nifer “Nobody Puts Baby in the C om er” Grey, whose career took a nose dive when she got a nose job. O r Michael “Hold the Baby Over the Balcony" Jackson, who simply cut off his nose to spite his race. But it’s not the prospect that I might end up looking like T he Joker that stops me. It’s the fact that I’d have to get cut up like a medical school cadaver. Call me crazy, but I have a hard O time signing up to do a procedure for which a possible side effect is “death.” Twenty people die for every 100,000 lipo suctions, although most of those operations are on Cher. These are actually pretty low odds compared to, say, I don’t know, something a real journalist would look up. But no matter how you slice it, plastic surgery is still a risk. It’s not that I’m particularly afraid of death; it’s just that I’d rather go in a less humiliating way. I don’t want to end up like Olivia Goldsmith, the author of The First Wives Club, who died earlier this year during a fairly routine surgery to remove excess skin from her chin and was memorialized in articles with headlines like “A Face to Die For.” You might as well write, “The author was shallow and vain to the very end.” So, since I’m simply too chicken to undergo plastic surgery, I’ve decided instead to be dogmat ically opposed to it and grow old wearing turtle necks in the summer like Katharine Hepburn. The fact is our consumer culture has become obsessed with the “new and improved.” But it’s time we came to appreciate what the Japanese call wabi-sahi, which isn’t an Asian spice but a Zen philosophy of seeing the beauty in things that are imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. As a society, we all need to embrace the aging process. T hat is, until they come up with a way o f slowing it down. And that, my friends, is The Gospel According to Marc. J H M a r c A c i t o s first novel, How I Paid for College, will be published in Septem ber. W rite him at m arc@ m arcacito.com . BORDERS BOOKS MUSIC MOVIES CAFE Hear & Meet Evan Wolfson Author Discussion & Signing Why M arriage M atters: America , Equality , and Gay People's Right to Marry L a s er S u r g er y N o w A v a il a b l e ! 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