Makeup
By ice rivers
- 194 reads
One of my earliest teevee memories ,which means one of my first memories period, is of the Milton Berle show. Even though I was barely seven, I got a big kick out of Uncle Miltie.
He had a regular routine in which he would pause in his schtick/skit or whatever he was doing and yell out the word "Makeup" at which point someone would rush into the scene and blast Berle with a gigantic powder puff which staggered Milton and covered him with white powder at which point Berle would look directly at the camera and mug fake surprise.
No matter how many times it happened, I was always taken off guard and laughed and couldn't wait for the next time that he would get clobbered. I didn't have any idea what the term makeup meant.
After all these years and after sisters, wives and daughters and granddaughters, I'm still mystified by makeup. How in the world did it ever become "normal" to have women paint their faces and repeat the paint job day after day after day.
It must be kinda nice, although a pain in the ass, to be able to make your face look better every day. To look into a mirror, make faces and learn how to shade the face in all the right places to become more feminine, nurturing, severe, dominant or submissive.
For we guys, after we brush our teeth, shave and comb our hair, we're more or less stuck with what we got. We're about as "masculine" as we're gonna get.
Too bad we don't have a similar transformative ritual that would help us mask our blemishes, insecurities and imperfections while at the same time making the camouflage look as if nothing had happened other than that we looked less pissed off, more sober, less intimidating, more highlighted and yet somehow more masculine.
Even if we had such a mechanism, I doubt if we'd use it as it simply would take too much effort and smack of the kind of vanity and narcissistic self- regard that isn't associated with our gender unless it had been forced upon us by societal peer pressure which as men we would likely resist as we have since the days of the dandys of the French court.
I'm a man goddamn it. This is how I look. Deal with this shit. Hey, I combed my hair, didn't I? What more do you want?
Then I hear about movie stars like Leonardo DiCaprio or Brad Pitt having to go to the makeup tent even though they already look about as masculine as possible and getting touched up somehow to make them luminate even more valiantly.
We don't need to glow, we especially don't need to outglow our women who have spent the last few centuries learning the craft and practicing their beautification rituals on a daily, sometimes hourly basis.
Yeah, we're supposed to be outdoors doing the manly thing and picking up the natural colors of the sun. We're tan and handsome and the fact that we don't glow makes us all that much more appealing to the opposite sex while we make our women paint their faces and dance and even avoid getting too much sun so they don't look masculine.
Lynn and I enjoy going to women's basketball games where the women don't indulge in a lot of face painting before each game knowing that they will sweat if off after the first half and they don't feel it's needed to take the break halftime to freshen up.
They radiate good health and feminine athleticism.
They look wonderful, even without makeup.
Then they pose for their individual pictures in the game program all rouged up and we fall for them again in a totally different way. Maybe they'd take it easy on us in a quick game of horse.
I remember reading an article in Cosmo 50 years ago that said the most irresistible compliment a boyfriend or husband can give to his girlfriend or wife is this..."you look wonderful even without your makeup"
A lot of "makeup sex" has been initiated by that observation particularly in the old days when women would cry and their mascara would run or they would be too pissed off to even make the effort to put the stuff on in the first place indicating clearly that the boyfriend, husband, asshole was already in some deep shit and better come up with something pretty quick about their appearance.
Although this is not a wild card. Some women might take the Cosmo observation as insincere and a slam that they don't know how to apply their makeup to get the kind of effect that they've been working on since they were twelve years old.
I wonder what would happen if at such tender moments, the woman pulled out a gigantic powder puff and clobbered the guy with it after yelling "makeup".
Might be funny in an early teevee kinda way.
Especially if life was like teevee.
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