Aren't You Forgetting Someone?

by Kari Lizer

  And because of that disparity, I decided I would not click on Kate Middleton’s bangs. I decided to stage a mini-revolt and refuse to objectify a princess. She is more than her looks, and I’m not going to participate in the culture that reduces accomplished women to their body parts. I just don’t have it in me anymore after the tearing down of the most accomplished political candidate we’ve ever had in this country who also happened to be a woman—the months of scrutiny over her hair, face, voice, clothes—it knocked the stuffing out of me. So I exited my AOL newspaper and walked away, but when I got to the office and opened my computer, it was still there under “Top News Stories.”

  The other headline shrieked, “Caitlyn Jenner Rocks Hervé Leger Bandage Dress in New York!” So you wanted to be a woman, Bruce? Okay. There will be no more talk of your astounding athleticism, your awards, or your contribution to the world of sports or anywhere else. We are now entitled to pick you apart one new boob at a time. It will feel great when you “rock it!” and less so when the press declares a fashion “miss.” We will be watching to see how you age, how you dress, and who you fuck. We will be ready to pounce if your dress doesn’t flatter your figure or your figure doesn’t hold up through the ravages of time, stress, and trends. I turned off my computer and decided to write on a yellow legal pad for the day. I find myself retreating more and more from technology. Soon I’ll be curled in my bed, next to a small burning candle, melting like the liberal snowflake that I am.

  Being a girl has always hurt my feelings. I never was a good show pony. Getting dressed up is the worst sort of punishment for me.

  In elementary school it actually was my punishment for a bad spelling test or misbehavior—my mom made me wear a dress to school. Acting may seem like an odd career choice for someone who doesn’t like to be looked at, but there are people who act to be seen and those who act to disappear. I was the latter. The wardrobe fitting was the bane of my existence. People looking me up and down, frowning at the many ways my body was letting down their hopes for the clothes they bought. Then the producers tromping in, talking in full voice about how they were going to make this work—this being me, a human. It really was such a relief when I stopped acting and moved over to the other side of the room. Though not less painful.

  These days I find myself sitting on the casting couch with those same executives, directors, and producers when a Truly Beautiful Forty-Five-Year-Old Actress walks through the door for her audition. She’s nervous. I try to convey to her with my eyes that I’m on her team. I’m her safe person. She does her thing, and she is barely out the door before it starts. She’s been famous since her midtwenties, so unfortunately for her, everyone gets to compare her beauty now to her beauty then. They get to. She asked for it.

  “She’s getting a little chunky,” says the producer with the heart attack body to my left.

  “She used to be hot,” says the gross bald one with the skin tag on his neck that makes me want to heave up my breakfast bran muffin.

  “Her agent swore to me she was holding up,” says the casting director as she stuffs the last piece of bagel into her Juvéderm-ed mouth.

  “I’d still fuck her,” says the studio president with breath that smells like a combination of sausage and sour milk.

  Then the rest of the homunculi agree: they’d still fuck her too.

  Imagine how relieved Truly Beautiful Forty-Five-Year-Old Actress would be to hear that. I wonder if I should run after her and give her the good news.

  “Hey! Hold up! You didn’t get the part, but the whole room would still be willing to fuck you!”

  Actresses suffer, but no woman escapes it. I’m not imagining it. I worked with a male writing partner for the first time last year and noticed the difference when we’d walk into a meeting. The first order of business was always the unwanted assessment of all things me: “Kari, is that a new shirt? And your hair is shorter. Are you going blonder? I remember when you used to wear clogs all the time. You look like you’re losing weight. Are you dating someone? Have you always worn glasses? Your butt looks good in those jeans.” I look over to my writing partner—a man my same age—in his rumpled button-down that I think he’s been wearing for three days and Levi’s jeans. He’s peacefully sipping his Starbucks and looking over our script.

  Once I said, “Are we going to do him now?” Nobody knew what I was talking about. “What do you think? Fatter? Skinnier? Hair longer? Shorter? Frizzier? What do you guys think about the way Bill’s ass is looking these days?”

  The executives in the room looked at me, horrified. “Don’t embarrass Bill!” they said protectively, as if I were some sort of monster. People don’t like it when women call them on their bullshit—in TV they call those women strident.

  I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of feminist hero for not looking at Kate Middleton’s bangs. I’m not. I’m susceptible to all the same things everyone else is. And I live in Los Angeles, where the booby traps are everywhere.

  Not long ago, a friend recommended a medi-spa in Studio City. A medi-spa is a place that offers beauty treatments but also has some kind of medical personnel on hand to deliver more aggressive treatments that require hypodermic needles and IV solutions. She said there was a woman there who gave the best oxygen facials—just the thing tired winter skin needed. I had tired winter skin. I had tired winter everything. Low-grade postelection depression for sure. So I made an appointment for a pick-me-up facial.

  Dr. M, the stylish, foreign-born cosmetologist (a gastroenterologist in her own country) took one look at my face and neck under the magnifying mirror and deducted, “You don’t use sunscreen, eh?”

  “Well, I do, but only starting about five years ago, when it was probably too late. My mother didn’t believe in skin cancer. And I’ve spent my whole life outside: at the beach, on a horse, on the sidelines of soccer fields and baseball diamonds and campgrounds.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  I didn’t know how to answer that.

  Then Dr. M poked at the furrow between my eyebrows with her fingernail.

  “You need Botox here. You look angry.”

  “I am angry,” I said. “No Botox, thanks. That’s not really for me.”

  “No Botox? Don’t be a baby. I escaped Iran with a five-year-old tucked under my arm, bullets whizzing past my head.”

  “I’m not a baby,” I said. “I’m a feminist.”

  “A feminist,” she practically spat back at me. “What’s feminine about your face falling into your soup?”

  “I didn’t say feminine—”

  “No,” she agreed.

  I gave up. I didn’t have to explain myself to this bully.

  “Okay, fine. But you should do the nonsurgical facelift. You watch Dr. Oz? He loves it. It’s the only thing that really works according to him. Here. Look.”

  Before I could object, she grabbed a large photo album from the counter and placed it in my lap. Then she announced she was going to mix some ingredients for my facial and she would be back. She left the room. She also left a magnifying mirror pointed at my face so that I was staring at an enlarged fisheye version of myself. That was mean. I quickly looked away and down at the photo album. I opened it and started looking at the pictures, large before-and-after photos of women of all ages. And what I was looking at was a book of miracles. Forty-five-year-old women with turkey-like wattles suddenly had firm jawlines and smooth necks. Sixty-year-old women with soft, jowly faces whose cheekbones had reappeared from beneath the saggy flesh. Seventy-five-year-old women whose youthful glow had reemerged as if by magic. By the time Dr. M came back into the room, I was a believer.

  I said, “I mean, these pictures are real, right?”

  “Of course they’re real. I’m a doctor. I took them myself.” Which would have made sense if she were a photographer, but I didn’t say so.

  “Okay,” I said, “I want a nonsurgical facelift!”

  “No,” she said. “If you’re only going to do one, forget it. Y
ou might as well not do any at all. You need a series of five to do any good.”

  God, she was a bully. I agreed to the series of five without even asking how much they cost because I was hypnotized by the before/after magic and also very, very afraid of Dr. M. Turns out I could have purchased a decent used car for what I paid to have my miracle treatments.

  She spread the numbing cream on my face and let it work for about thirty minutes while she told me about all the procedures she did to herself. She asked me to guess how old she was. I had no idea. Honestly, it was impossible to tell. She could have been seventy or forty-five. Her waxy complexion looked neither young nor old. Alive nor dead. Finally she said, “Sixty-two.” It wasn’t impressive or disappointing. Like I said, she just looked weird. So why was I letting her do shit to my face? Excellent question. She fired up the nonsurgical facelift machine and went to work. Several crazy sharp molten hot needles pierced my skin.

  “Ow! That really fucking hurts! I thought I was supposed to be numb.”

  “I do it to myself without any numbing at all. But I also ran from bullets speeding past my head when I escaped Iran.”

  I know! You told me! I thought but didn’t say out loud because I was scared and she was holding a weapon.

  After that I didn’t dare even wince when she punctured my face with the torture device. I tried to remember my Lamaze breathing from childbirth.

  After my series of five nonsurgical facelifts, I can honestly report that I look exactly the same as when I started. Except that I was quite allergic to the numbing cream and developed an ugly rash on my neck. Which I fully deserved because I fell for that sexist Iranian bully’s tricks.

  The other thing I fell for was the relentless coverage of the duchess’s hairdo because when I got back home from work that day, I did it. I clicked on the Kate Middleton story. And there they were. The bangs. You couldn’t really even call them bangs. They were more of a feathered fringe. From the urgency of the headlines I’d expected something dire—a shocking, too short, New York–coffeehouse sort of trim. The kind not meant to flatter the face but instead say, “This is what I look like—deal with it.” Kate Middleton’s bangs were so subtle that her banged self was completely indistinguishable from her former unbanged self. I was tricked into expecting a full-on bang controversy, and they got me. I was ashamed of myself.

  Then that click sent me down a rabbit hole of related stories in columns to the left of Kate Middleton’s bangs because of whatever woman-bashing algorithm I had unleashed. An ad popped up to sell me a peel that promised to rid me of the hideous uneven skin tone that plagued my disgusting, deteriorating face. Another for diaper underwear for women who pee when they laugh. Horrid pictures of celebrities caught without their makeup that were supposed to make us all feel better about ourselves. I think they wanted Goldie Hawn to kill herself for having the audacity to wear a bathing suit in her late sixties. I finally shut down my computer. My revolution had failed.

  Then, as my final act, just before bed, I stood over my sink in the bathroom, my hair combed down over my eyes. I took the scissors from the drawer, and with a steady hand, I did it. I cut my bangs. I think I’ll like having bangs. I like the way they frame my face. I like the way they cover the angry furrow between my eyebrows that’s deepened since they didn’t elect that woman. I think they look good. I just hope everyone else likes them too.

  Late Bloomer

  Life is a long and winding road. When I was in the eighth grade, I entered the competition to give the speech at graduation for my middle school. I basically just copied the lyrics to that Beatles song. When I didn’t get selected, I was outraged. It went to some overachiever Goody-Two-shoes straight-A student who babbled on and on about being your own person and following your dreams, which is basically the boring way of saying, “Life is a long and winding road.” That was pretty much the last time I stuck my neck out for any academic pursuit. I’m a sore loser. Which is unfortunate because as the long and winding road continued, so did my losing streak.

  Next up was high school, where I noticed that some girls are born to be teenagers. Like Tina Little, with her Farrah Fawcett hair; square, white teeth; skin that stayed tan all year long; and shiny leg skin that glistened on Fridays when the cheerleaders got to wear their uniforms to school for game days. I tried out for cheerleading, but I was terrible. I have oddly tight hamstrings and a problem remembering dance steps for more than five seconds. It’s the same when I cook from a recipe. I have to constantly keep looking at the cookbook—none of the directions stick in my head. So instead, I tried to impress boys by offering to eat anything anybody dared me to: the macho nachos from Del Taco, two Bob’s Big Boy double cheeseburgers, four jumbo bags of Peanut M&M’s… seriously, I can stick my whole fist in my mouth—there’s a picture of me doing it in the yearbook.

  It didn’t have quite the same effect on the guys as a seventeen-year-old beauty queen bouncing on the sidelines, kicking her leg over her head and showing the crowd her skimpy dance pants. Very few teenage boys appreciate funny girls—except the drama nerds.

  Another thing the girls in high school liked to do is wear their boyfriends’ varsity football jackets. The jackets were giant on them, so the girls felt petite and birdlike. Their hands didn’t reach the ends of the sleeves, making them appear shrunken, and for some reason, handless mini-women equaled sexy. The drama nerds were mostly slight bird boys themselves, so their jackets wouldn’t zip over my boobs, creating more of a stuffed sausage effect. The only exception was Kevin Wilson, who wore a cape, but wearing the lead from Chino High School’s production of Sing Ho for a Prince’s cape wasn’t really the same thing as a varsity football jacket, so I didn’t come into my own in high school either.

  In my early twenties, I was a struggling actress, with the emphasis on struggle. Between my infrequent acting jobs, I was a nanny, a housekeeper, a terrible waitress at a comedy club, a terrible waitress at a Middle Eastern restaurant, and a pretty good hostess at a couple of bad Mexican restaurants, including Baja Cantina in Malibu, where my duties included pouring Larry Hagman from his barstool into a cab at the end of the night. I was an elderly companion, a paid party guest, a housepainter, a dog walker, the person who picked lobsters out of a tank in a bathing suit, and a personal assistant to a has-been pervert producer. He wasn’t a has-been pervert—he was still a pervert. He was a has-been producer who stood behind me stroking his Oscar—meaning Academy Award, not a nickname for his penis (though I wouldn’t be surprised)—while I called Musso & Frank, trying to get him a table for lunch—him insisting he had a regular booth, the person on the other end of the phone having no idea who he was. I told him I had to go home at lunch and let my dog out one day, and I never returned. He called me every day for about two weeks, first threatening me if I violated my confidentiality agreement, then asking if we could talk, finally offering me a raise and a trip to Cabo if I’d come back and keep him company.

  After a stint with a pathologically lying boyfriend who pretended to have cancer to get me to have sex with him and not ask too many questions when he disappeared for days at a time, I took what I thought was a step up and started dating an actor whose star was on the rise. His star didn’t have far to travel: born in San Diego, educated at USC, weekends spent either at his parents’ beach house or aboard their sailboat venturing up the California coast—the guy hadn’t known a lot of hardship. Which was nothing against him. He was just used to fun. And winning. Which is fun. And I was in a low period.

  The brakes had just gone out on my car, so I was stringing together odd jobs that were within biking distance of my Venice apartment and praying for auditions that were within biking distance of my Venice apartment. I hitchhiked a few times but only accepted rides from women or men with surfboards on their cars—I don’t know why I thought surfers weren’t capable of murder. It didn’t help that for Christmas my family thought it would be funny if everyone got me a live animal as a gift. My parents got me two cats. My sister got me
a rat from the science lab at her college. My brother got me a cockatiel. I already had a dog.

  When I returned home from a long, hard day of making fourteen dollars, my pets would all come flying, running, or slinking from wherever they’d been hiding to greet me. It was crazy but kind of magical. I don’t know why they didn’t eat each other.

  The people we hung out with were the young Hollywood up-and-comers who were acting in movies of the week about eating disorders and starting theater companies that gave their profits to Farm Aid. I was a late bloomer in a crowd of early peakers, and I couldn’t keep up. I also couldn’t afford to skip off to “this amazing spa in the desert” for the weekend. Or even a day at Disneyland. When they’d plan their fun outings and my soon-to-be-famous boyfriend knew I couldn’t afford to go, he would ask, “Would you rather I stay home with you?” in the same tone of voice I used when I asked my grandma with emphysema if she wanted me to come visit her and her oxygen tank for the weekend. I usually let him off the hook because I think he tried to be a good guy. He even gave me therapy for Christmas. I had to explain to him I wasn’t crazy, just poor.