AROUND THE KITCHEN TABLE

Maureen Weber

For most of my life, I’ve hated my nose. I wouldn’t say I like it now, but we’ve established a sort of truce: it won’t change, and I won’t call it terrible things when I look in the mirror.
 
The thing is, it could change, if I really wanted it to. I’ve often asked myself: If I had the financial means, would I avail myself of the latest medical technology to tweak my appearance? I don’t mean the stuff that temporarily minimizes lines and makes tired skin appear fresh. I’m talking about full-scale plastic surgery — the kind that can erase genetics by straightening the bump on my nose, and turning it up at the end, à la Victoria Beckham.
 
A series of events caused me to think about this recently — it started with watching Nicolas Cage in the recent Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans. I kept wondering why he looked weird, to the point that it distracted from the story itself. He spent a lot of the movie being miserable, but he never looked it — throughout, his face remained oddly uncreased.
 
A later search on the Internet for plastic surgery and Nicolas Cage didn’t come up with much, but I did find out everything I had been too naïve to realize before: most celebrities have had “work” done. I’m not an Internet voyeur, but it was shocking and somewhat riveting to see row upon row of before and after pictures. Aside from the straightened and narrowed noses, puffy lips that have no resemblance to anything found naturally in the human family, and taut skin on 75-year-olds, there was the truly grotesque: mask-like, expressionless faces and pulled, wide-awake eyes.
 
A short while after Bad Lieutenant, I watched Mel Gibson’s Edge of Darkness in which he plays an enraged, grieving father who has “nothing to lose.” While I deplore Mel’s utterances, beliefs and recent behaviour, he is likeable on screen because he successfully embodies conflicted, flawed humanity. He achieves it, I think, partly because he looks real. Here is an actor who is aging normally (always a film heartthrob, Mad Mel now looks sort of like my husband!), with a creased forehead and crinkles at the corners of the eyes that extend down an even more deeply lined face. Mel Gibson’s performance was utterly without vanity — refreshing in what I refer to as our plastic-cene era.
 
The theme of faces continued with a doctor visit in which I inquired to the petite, attractive 50-something woman if it was prudent to continue HRT given the controversy surrounding it. “Oh, you should stay on it for the skin alone,” she said. “I sag in places I didn’t even know skin could sag.” And then she added, “It sucks to get old.” Evidently age is no guarantee of wisdom.
 
All of us have things we don’t like about our appearance, and for the most part they’re minor. But what if they are not minor? In 2006 renowned film critic Roger Ebert lost most of his jaw through cancer surgery, and with it the ability to speak, eat and drink. Esquire magazine did a poignant piece on Ebert in March, in which they ran a full-page photo of his face. He said he “winced” when he saw it, but then said, “that’s how I look, after all.”
It would now be medically possible for him to have a new face, he says, but even so, he doesn’t want one. “I feel it would be an act of disloyalty to my own face. I have lived with it so long.” He shares his experiences through his writing: “I studiously avoid looking at myself in a mirror. It would not be productive. If we think we have physical imperfections, obsessing about them is only destructive.”
 
Our faces not only connect us with our own past, they also connect us with generations past. I’ve seen only one picture of my great grandmother, my grandfather’s mother, but she has exactly the same two lines in the middle of her forehead as I do. It was shocking to see someone I’ve never met, in a sepia-toned photo from perhaps the late 1800s, with intimately familiar features.
 
Looking around the room at a recent gathering of extended family and friends, I could see resemblances that were both fascinating and comforting. In the flash of a daughter’s smile, I could see my mother as clearly as if she was in the room. I could hear the sound of my dad’s voice in my brothers and in my son. Baby Claire was like a prism, reflecting her parents, her uncle and the proud grandparents who introduced her to the guests.
 
A former neighbour approached me whom I hadn’t seen in maybe 35 years, and I was a bit confused as she began to speak. You see, she looked exactly like her own mother did about that long ago, and for a moment it was almost as though I was speaking to her mother instead of to her. What she told me was a gift. She said, “You are as beautiful as your mother was.”
 
It’s taken me 50 years to answer the hypothetical question I’ve always asked myself. No. Given the means, I would never alter my face. Not only have I gotten used to the person I see in the mirror, I even kind of like her. Still, I’m pretty happy that my four children have not inherited my nose.