Wit and Wisdom
by Beth Broderick
My hair is really short—way shorter than I wanted it to be. It looks fine, I guess, and blessedly is no longer purple, but dang it, why so short? The fellow who has been taking care of it for me is lovely and kind, and I am a bit fascinated by him, so I was maybe not paying enough attention to the “hair” part of the appointment and too much to the “him” part. He does house calls, and I needed a trim. It all felt very casual and chatty and delightfully social, and while I sat there being charmed, he just set about cutting, cutting, cutting, which I did not take note of until three inches of my tresses lay strewn across the kitchen floor.
The thing about short hair is you have to style it. When I poof it up and put some energy into it, it looks great, but on a soggy, foggy morning, plastered to the sides of my head, not so much. I can go from fashion model to Mary McGillicutty in mere moments. From Ralph Lauren matron to Appalachian crone in one block of high wind. Of course, I suppose that can be true with any length of hair.
My mother always insisted that I keep my hair short because hers was, and she looked great, and I guess the theory was that I would, too. I was a pudgy adolescent, and my cheekbones had not fully announced themselves, so I looked a bit like a redheaded Cabbage Patch doll. In short, short did not look good on me. But back then, I never wore it long, so I really have no images from those days to compare it to. Maybe I just didn’t look so good. The teen years can be unkind in that regard. I am still haunted by the specter of that deeply unpopular Junior High gal.
“You have a face like the moon!” the very high-powered director exclaimed. “I cannot shoot a face like yours.”
I had just appeared in a film for the studio he had a deal with, and they cottoned to my performance, so they were pushing him to hire me for his new movie. It was about a tree that eats babies, and they thought me perfect for the role of the valiant nanny who takes on the Evil Oak. He did not share that opinion and had a young woman whom he was very “close to” in mind.
“You are obese. You need to lose at least thirty pounds.”
“Sir, I am 5’8” and I weigh 118. If I did that, I would be dead.”
“Well, maybe so, but at least I could shoot your face. You’d have better angles.”
This went on for another ten minutes before the casting director thankfully ended our meeting.
I went home and lay on the floor and sobbed for hours. I cried for days, because there was no way I could lose weight and still be healthy. Of course, the whole thing was ridiculous. I had starred or co-starred in several shows and movies by then, and folks had no problem shooting my face. My face was considered by most to be a good one, but his words stung.
I proceeded to lose five pounds and was pronounced “scary thin” by the tabloids–a no-win situation. It would be quite a while before I recovered from that meeting.
NOT A HAIR OUT OF PLACE.
I will be 66 years old tomorrow, and I know better, but I confess to wasting several hours worrying about my hair being too short, wondering if that means my visage would suddenly morph into “Moon Face.” Would I suddenly be 12 years old again and shunned by most of my peers?
This fear has been widely contradicted by the considerable number of people who have complimented my hair, some going so far as to call my cut “terrific.” So, I have largely let go of the worry, but I felt it was worth reporting about, because so many, many girls and women harbor these negative ideas about their appearance. We spend way too much time caring about such things. This affects men, too, but mostly not as deeply or woundingly as it does the females of our species.
After a spell in my early twenties where I carried a whopping 123 lbs. and two brief run-ins with minor medication-related weight gain, I have spent the whole of my lifetime toggling between 116 and 118. And that is the least important thing about me, I mean, who gives a hoot about that? Are we going to write on my gravestone: “Here lies Beth. She sure did keep her weight down!”? And yet …. It all makes me wonder how old a gal has to be to come to outgrow these silly, time-wasting thoughts.
Older than 66, I guess. Dang.
66 is a bit of a letdown after the whiz-bang antics that surrounded turning 65. It’s a dull number, salvaged only slightly by having a famous highway named for it. One I have only sporadically traversed, but going the length of Route 66 remains on my bucket list.
I ended up guest-starring on a procedural show that was helmed by that “You have a moon face” director twenty years later. He was highly complimentary, told me I was a terrific actor. His baby-eating tree movie had been a bomb, and folks had long ago stopped being willing to finance any of his feature ambitions. He seemed content to be doing the rather routine and comparatively mundane job of capturing actors discovering murdered folks and then trying to figure out who done it. Most of us in TV and film love what we do and are just happy to be doing it.
I did not mention having met him before or the brutal nature of that event. Showbiz is a tough game. He wanted his chosen actress to star in his movie and was hell-bent on destroying anyone who got in the way of that. I was simply introduced to him for the right reason at the wrong time. His movie tanked, and it would soon be his turn to take some tough hits, to find himself unwanted for the job. I did not feel the need to remind him of his cruelty nor to relive a complicated exchange with him.
I shot the show, and he was completely lovely, and bygones were bygones. Mostly.
My birthday will be a low-key event this year—a weekend in Palm Springs with Michael. Dinner with my sisters and their new baby, a young lad named Kalen with whom I am borderline obsessed. A few dinners with pals, but no great ten-day excursions to a foreign land. The celebrations of the day of my birth will not drag on for a month as they did last time. I had a slice of good carrot cake at lunch yesterday, and we sang The song. That’ll do.
Also, I am starting to really like my hair. Life is long if you are lucky. I’m a lucky gal.
On we go …
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