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 .
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