My Favorite Faces

And she walked up – Rachel, I mean, and she’s my daughter – and she put her hands right up on my face, like one on either cheek, and she looked me dead in the eyes.

She said, “You sort of look like Bette Davis.”

And I thought, “Okay.”  I thought, “This is something I can live with. There are a lot worse things a nine year old can tell you than you look like than Bette Davis.”

She said, “Or Steve Buscemi. Yeah.”  She said, “You look like a cross between Bette Davis and Steve Buscemi.”

And you know how sometimes somebody says something to you – just some off-the-cuff remark or random thought – and you just know that you’re going to remember it twenty years from now? Like you’re going to be sitting on your death bed and you’re going to be going over your life and this is going to be one of the two dozen or so things you can recall?

For the rest of my life, every time I look in a mirror, I am going to think Bette Davis.

…Or Steve Buscemi…

…Or I’m going to think Bette Davis and Steve Buscemi…

Thank God she doesn’t know who Peter Lorre is.

So that got me thinking about faces and thinking about beauty, and then I read this study the other day, and it turns out that scientists? They know. They’ve got it all mapped out, this facial beauty thing. They know the proportions. They know the shapes. They know the symmetry behind the whole thing.

They know what we like and they know why we like it.

Florence Colgate,
possessor of the perfect face.

They know Florence Colgate has the perfect female face. This is the face that males see and want to breed with. Which is really what the whole beauty thing is about, anyway. Breeding, I mean. Fitness for reproduction.

But I am generally attracted to women and – with all due respect to Ms. Florence Colgate – if I saw that face coming down the street, and then it went away, and then five minutes later walked back past me, I’m not sure I’d remember having seen it the first time.

I admit that might not be a deal breaker for human males seeking a mating partner. Hell, it might even be a plus.

Maybe I’m just weird. I am probably weird, what with the unnatural sexual proclivities and all that abominating.

But I can remember my thinking for a few years back now and ever since I can remember, I have been drawn to interesting faces. Not healthy faces. Not symmetrical faces. Not perfect faces of the sort that scientists would pick out with their fancy computer programs.

Interesting faces. Faces like puzzles. Faces that make you wonder what is going on inside, behind the eyes. How did they get that way? How the hell’d they grow that thing?

Young Lou... and old. 

Lou Reed looks like he might have some sort of congenital mental disorder and I find his face endlessly fascinating. I could stare at him all day if most his music weren’t so bad.

If an art student painted a picture of a person with a face like Patti Smith, his instructor would immediately fail him. She looks like something terrible happened to her during the night.

Sometimes Tom Waits looks like he has fetal alcohol syndrome.

So does Neil Young.

And Polly Jean Harvey looks like a Muppet and young Roger Waters looked like an alien doing a shitty job at trying to pass himself off as a human. Phillip Glass looks like a fish and Samuel Beckett always looked (to me, at any rate) as though he’d had brain surgery that got botched and left him… you know, left him a little bit “off”, as they say.

But these people have the greatest faces I have ever seen. I take one glance at them and I’ll never forget them. Any of them. I take one glance at them and I want to know more.

Young Patti Smith... and old.

Now, no one would look like any of these people on purpose, villagers with torches being what they are. Nobody walks into their barber let alone their plastic surgeon and says, “Yeah, I want to look like Lou Reed. Can you make my eyes go in two different directions at the same time?”

And who else, who else? Who am I missing?

How about Bette Davis and Steve Buscemi?

Life is too short to spend drooling over a generic department store mannequin.

Maybe I’m just rationalizing my own freakiness…

Born This Way?!

If one more person says to me that I cannot help the way I am, we are going to have a problem.

If one more person tells me this, I am going to do something I will probably live to regret. But then I’ll only end up getting arrested and with my luck, I’ll have a defense attorney who tells the jury, “Do not send Katy to prison! After all, she cannot help the way she is! She was… [drumroll, high hat, Ba-Ba-DUM!] BORN THIS WAY!”

Like there was this one time. It was me, and it was Jack, and that guy with the cauliflower ear who wouldn’t drive you to the airport, and Rufus, and Eggplant and the Glob. I’m not sure who else was there, but Cauliflower Ear Guy was definitely doing the driving.

We were in the van. Plenty of room.

I remember this because Cauliflower Ear Guy kept turning around, all the way around in his seat so he could look me in the eyes when he talked and I thought we were going to run a red light. But we did not run a red light, which only goes to prove that either God loves morons or some lights in Houston never turn red.

And I was drunk or I was stoned, or most probably both, so I did not pay attention to how we got onto the subject. But then there I was, in the van, and he was turned around in his seat looking me in the eyes and he said, “But Katy! You owe it to the com-mun-ity! You have a talent for words, so you have to explain to the rest of the world how we are BORN THIS WAY!”

That’s when I asked to be dropped off right there and then, even though we were all the way down Richmond and Greenbriar and I didn’t have my phone. Well, I didn’t so much ask to be dropped off as I shouted, “I don’t need some Hyde Park queer telling me how I was born! Release me from this Sodomy Wagon this very instant, or so help me…blah blah blah.”

 They got the general idea.

There is a cultural meme that has gone pandemic in recent years, and it states that gaity, lesbiality, and trans-whatcha-got-ism is genetic. That Daddy stood too close to a microwave the night of that hot date with Momma and hoakum, stoke’em and bam! Instant beautiful bouncing Cher fan.

Somehow or other, this whole “BORN THIS WAY” thing is supposed to make everybody else cease and desist in their joke-telling and their institutionalized-discrimination-ing. No one will be nervous around me in the showers at the gym if only I can show that this is what them lawyers like to call an “immutable characteristic.” As though the genetic argument ever worked for American blacks or the fatties or… I don’t know… Canadian “Star Trek” fans.

What I always tell people – and what I would have told Cauliflower Ear Guy that day if I had not been too drunk or too stoned or most probably both – is that it’s not just that the “BORN THIS WAY” mantra is never going to work on the Sarah Palins and Trent Lotts and Benedict XVIs of the world. It’s that it’s insulting, to boot!

Here is the thing: It took me better than a decade, multiple therapists, thousands of diary pages, several debilitating habits, a couple suicide attempts and a couple dozen fist fights to decide what worked for me in my human relationships. I have enough mental and physical scars on me because of it to make THREE whole Katy suits.

Now you’re going to waltz on in here and tell me we could have skipped right to the climactic reveal with a Q-Tip, some saliva, and a high-powered microscope?

You are denying me the importance of my life experience. Hell, you’re practically negating the whole concept of free will.

Pull this goddamned van over this instant, Cauliflower Boy; you and me are going at it, mano a dyko.

If – and they always like this phrase – you people do not stop this nonsense and stop it straightaway, then you will leave me no choice but to declare my undying love for my bedpost and demand recognition of my relationship based on my genetic predisposition. “Yes, you see this gene sequence right here – A, T, G, G, C, A? – we see that all the time in bedpost lovers…”

The DNA Mafia
claims credit again.

And sure, I’d have to put up with all sorts of crap, because Leviticus 12:69 clearly and unambiguously states, “Behold, I am the Lord thy God, and I say unto thee that thou shalt love thy bedpost but thou shalt not LOVE thy bedpost (if thou knowest what thy God means), for it is an abomination and would force thy God to smite thee heartily.”

I’m paraphrasing, I think…

The bedpost lovin’ thing would be great, though, because we’d get to have our own nightclubs and an annual parade, and the Reverend Fred Phelps wouldn’t know what hit him. Yeah…

Anyway, I had some sort of point in saying all of this, initially. I forget now…

Oh yeah: You can call me broken. Just don’t call me “BORN THIS WAY!!” And if one more person says to me that I cannot help the way I am, we are going to have a problem…