Jen Laird White

I watched the Academy Awards last night, from bed, and having only seen those fine films nominated in the category of Animation I fell asleep at 9:40, exhausted from a combination of last weeks school vacation and old age.  But I stayed up just long enough to notice one thing.  Robert Downey Jr appears to have had work done.  I’m serious.  His once craggy, drug addicted, naughty boy face is now smooth as my six year olds bottom.  Which brings me to the “Face or Ass” adage.  A wise friend who is both pencil skinny and who had a face lift before she rang half a century, gave me the advice that, at some point, women (and apparently Robert Downey, Jr) must choose between their face and their ass.   I was twenty eight.  I didn’t even begin to get it.  At that age I had a lot more ass than I do now and, now that I think of it,  a lot more face.  I was a puffy, full eyebrowed, unlined version of myself who stared at women configured like Charlotte Rampling and longed for less face, less ass not to mention eyebrows.  It took a few years to figure out that the eyebrow problem was fixable but the ass and face issue continues to plague me.   I just read an interview with Jane Fonda who is past seventy.  I think she looks better than she ever has and she seems to agree.  Apparently she was a bit like me.  All youthful puff and eyebrows.  Her cheeks were apparently so round that some deep Hollywood movie director, understanding the true value of things in life, proposed she get her jaw broken to give her face more definition.  She thought long and hard and opted out of tremendous pain, healing and the possibility of complications, not to mention testifying on any stand, and went for the other chiseling option, aging, which seems to suck fat from the face like a semi collider with an atom.  In her case, it worked.  She looks better than ever.  Or at least I think so.  Her ass looks pretty damned good too so I suspect a bit of doctor intervention on one or the other, but still.  Here’s the question.  Must one choose either face or ass?  Does the fatter the ass mean smoother the skin?  Do four hundred pound gals have the faces of  pre-teens and skinny butted women of a certain age have flesh hanging off their faces like a dress on a Supermodel?  I don’t pretend to know.  I’m skinnier now than I was as a twenty year old.  It’s only because I have a little more discipline and I reject the full case of beer and a pint of Ben and Jerrys as the perfect Saturday night.  My face is a heck of a lot more wrinkled but, somehow, I like it better.  Except for those lines over my lips, the product of  a wicked smoking habit that I still miss but kicked eleven years ago.  I don’t like those because they remind me, every day, of how much I still wish I smoked.  Sort of just kidding.  I look every bit my age.  But I don’t look bad.  Would I look better if I put on ten pounds?  I don’t know.  I have plump friends with no wrinkles and skinny friends with no wrinkles (of course they are either Greek or African American, two groups remarkably exempt from the effects of gravity and time).  I have medium sized friends who have  had their eyes done and it does make them look like they just woke from a long winters nap.  We’re talking full hibernation rested.  I have an acquaintance who was always skinny, never wrinkled and had a face lift even though she said she didn’t.  My friend Mary and I stalked her at a Harry Potter party and came to the conclusion that she was full of shit and that she was pulled tighter than the skin on an African drum and that it just made her look like a fifty year old with a face life.  And something that made her lips look odd.  Phew.  We breathed a sigh of relief The facelift question was answered.  Or at least delayed.  SHE, the woman of the Harry Potter stalking CLEARLY looked worse.  And filled. With something that had not been manufactured at Hogwarts.  Mary , the same Mary, sat with me in stunned disbelief at lunch with another friend who said “You two have had nothing done?  That’s unbelievable.And unwise.” and proceeded to reel off a list of people who’d been getting nipped, tucked and injected since we were fat faced twenty somethings. And we sat there, stretched grins like the sixth graders who discover that everyone is wearing  a training bra and smoking behind the library, but them.  We felt like idiots but calmed slightly when she explained that for HER every eight month regimen of injectables, she was fully anesthetized.  C’mon.  Full anesthesia for COSMETIC SURGERY.  Can you say “complications”.  Humiliation, trust me, even if you are dead.  

I don’t know about this aging thing.  How to do it gracefully and, more importantly,  without tremendous pain and excessive suturing.  I don’t know if I need to get fatter to get rid of the wrinkles or if I need to stay skinny with a bit of a road map traversing the face if the light isn’t just perfect.  And it’s only going to get worse.  But, I don’t want to look like Robert Downey, Jr.  On many levels.  And I do want to look like Jane Fonda.  And I don’t know where to start.

I do know that my friend Jean who’s a beauty expert says that one of the few products she really thinks works is Retin A.  So this weekend I decided to start there.  I ran out and bought some Neutrogena product that had the phrase “wrinkle eliminator” on it.  I don’t believe that for a second but it does contain Jeans Retin A.  And I’m excited.  I can hear Cher singing “If I could turn back time” as I swipe on my “pearl sized drop”.  So, before I hit the injectables and the paralytics not to mention the scalpels and the really big medical bills in a time of recession.  Retin A.  Right on those nice smile lines you see to your left.  Retin A.  And then maybe I can keep both my ass and my face.  It should be possible, right?  And if that doesn’t work, I’m willing to contemplate the Ben and Jerry’s.  And the case of beer.  Every Saturday night.  For medicinal purposes. Only.