In a life of embarrassing moments, slices of time I’ve begun to treasure both for their ghastly horror and for their uniqueness, there are a few that stand out even so.  One was when I met again, after a few years of no contact, my insurance agent here in Boulder.  He was a good guy, married, successful, and good with his clients.

 

When I bumped into him, I stared uncomprehendingly at this man pumping my hand and saying how great it was to see me.  He finally noticed my blank stare and recalled his name to me, and at that point, being glad to see him, I said so and my last line to him after the handshake ended, perhaps embarrassed because I hadn’t recognized him, was “you look great.  You’ve changed…..”   I drifted off into silence as he grew beet red and looked down with a frozen smile.  “Good to see you, too!” he said with remarkable sincerity I did not deserve as he strode off.

 

Well, yes, he had changed.  Dark hair once turning to gray was now a shiny reddish hue.  His skin looked rather unnaturally white, with no blemishes.  His face looked tight, with no wrinkles.  He’d always been thin.  The skin around his eyes had been drawn back so that they sort of, but not quite, looked like what a Caucasian kid’s face looks like when he pretends to be Oriental and pulls the skin back at the eyes.

 

In a word, my acquaintance looked very, very strange and unnatural.

 

As I continue my journey into my late and yet amazingly attractive and sexy youth (I heard that….), I am increasingly amazed at the biodegrading, ambulatory corpses that purport to be people I once found attractive or a friend or both.  Generally remarkably unobservant, I now feel I can smell a henna job a mile away.  I cannot believe I once thought I just had a bad memory, and that so and so actually had red hair all along.  Ugly red hair.  Red of a sort that is not found in nature.  Further, I don’t know how this became in anyone’s mind more attractive that salt and pepper, and would look natural.  It’s even worse than bald guys who think nobody notices if they wear a cap.  Like all lies, the cover-up is worse than the initial failing.  If failing it was.   

 

And not just the ones in my personal or actual life.  Those in my fantasy or, at least, web life are proving annoying as well.

 

Some years ago, it began to be apparent, both in Hollywood and within those who would be mistaken for Hollywood, that women were beginning to alter their bodies to resemble their idols, to the point now where large - overly large - breasts are common, and they’re no longer as sexy to this practiced eye because they’re no longer unique …..everyone seems to have them.  Worse, and counterproductively, they’re not as much fun as the real thing while doing the real thing with someone blessed with them.  If you cannot tell a fake breast at the touch, you’ve never felt a real one.  That would be an environmental and mass psychological disaster if large segments of the male population grew up never having known the touch of an actual breast unadorned with fluff bags and their scars.  That, apparently, could and might happen.

 

But while getting the most giggles, breast enhancement isn’t the worst thing about all this.  It is now getting close to home.

 

Jessica Lange, with whom I’ve been in love since 1976’s King Kong, is roughly my age, and to this wholly unbiased eye she rode into late youth herself with great dignity and grace and beauty altered but intact.  She never seemed to wear makeup; she always seemed to be natural.  No more.  I saw a recent picture of her, and she has started the slow decline into Joan Rivershood.   She looks awful, now, and worse yet: like everyone else. 

 

Plastic surgery has a homogenizing effect, like a graphics smoothing device, and the unique and lovely seem to merely get worse, once started.   They cannot register emotion on the face, they cannot shut their eyes, at least given the jobs I’ve seen, and just as Network has proven so true it works no more as satire but as prophecy, Brazil may yet play the same role for plastic surgery.

 

I thought Jessica Lange was the sort of woman who’d never do such a thing, who didn’t need to.  This means war.

 

On the male side, Bruce Jenner, safely testosteronic and once the world’s greatest all around athlete, is not going quietly into that good night either, but he is making the journey with no dignity and no common sense.  He now looks like Gary Null, who does those ‘power aging’ shows on PBS and who himself has had so much plastic surgery and he resembles something just off the slab and walking around, and inexplicably unentombed. 

 

Lange and Jenner are hardly the worst, though.  Not even close.  That would have to go to this woman of whom I had never previously heard until I ran across her on Wonkette, or rather Wonkette’s reference to Fleshbot, a sister site, which pushed me to Bad Plastic Surgery.  Here is something so awful that it’s hard to put into words.  And none of the surgery is better than what was there.  That’s what’s scary.

 

Go to their site and wander.  It’s designed as a freak show, and it is, but there is something even scarier at work, here.  These people think they look good, better, and that nobody realizes just how sick they’re revealing themselves to be.  This woman has a jaw that would be too big on Arnold.  Or Secretariat.

 

It’s easy to drop kick Michael Jackson around.  It’s easy to repeat the hoary old put down that here’s the great American dream: that a poor young black boy can grow up to be rich white woman.  But people acknowledge that Jackson is ill, too damaged to have a grip on reality, his or ours, and this has actually worked to his advantage with his criminal and legal woes.  This is because, absolutely and without doubt, most of us think he’s mentally damaged from his youth, and the remarks of his father do little to offset that, and that we’re a little bit responsible.

 

What isn’t remarked upon – often enough, anyway – is that many if not most of those who undergo plastic surgery are guilty of the same delusions.  To lesser degrees and often with the sense of humor that is utterly missing in Jackson, but still….it’s there.  They really do think they’re fooling someone.

 

It’s often themselves, and at first blush, why not?  Why not feel better about yourself, because we all know that’s a big thing towards making a soul happier, better to be around, and usually a better employee and co-worker.  Why not?  

 

Maybe because it doesn’t end?  Because temporary pleasure at the victory over time leads to greater depression when it isn’t enough and keeps you fixated on this long defeat?  Because for everyone who says and perhaps means you look great, many more snicker and gossip?

 

Because, with enough surgery, you cease resemblance to genetics and family, you lose the character lines that recall your life, and you come to look like nothing and no one so much as the increasing numbers of others who’ve had plastic surgery?  I think so; I think we’re creating a new family grouping, those not only with the tiny scars on the inside of their breasts like barely eighteen Lindsey Lohan (I ran across it in Wonkette, really…) but those with scars at the hairline and back where fat and unneeded tissue was tossed away.

 

The glossary of terminology is a clue as to who is steering and propelling an issue.  Getting rid of “imperfections” and retaining “youth” is not really the fuelling factor, however much the surgeons want that image out there.  Every time those terms are used in a supposed PBS ‘news’ analysis of a public issue, it’s an ad for plastic surgery, reinforcing your need to stay young.

 

The issue is, it doesn’t make people look young or better or improved.  It makes you look like someone who’s had plastic surgery, if anyone notices at all.  You’ve been removed from one group and placed in another where members do not want to acknowledge each other’s presence, and when folks like me notice, and have now been trained to, the jig’s up.