The foundation needs a change

August 1, 2007

My flat stare has come full circle and squarely back at me.
At 46 I should already have learned the following lessons; makeup doesn’t work in 33 degrees celsius weather, gin on the rocks doesn’t mix, and that even though I am a multi-tasking, female entity I should wave a white flag sometimes.
I also should have come to know that even though the humid weather makes my fingers swell to the size of small sausages, it is not the culprit behind my “Buddha.”
But let’s get back to the makeup thing.
Sometimes when I look in the mirror all I see are crow’s feet, grey hair, and crevices deep enough in my forehead to plant seeds in. I’ve thought about standing back a bit to the point where everything is blurry, but if I did that I wouldn’t know where I was, as my eyesight, too, is on a racetrack to reading glasses.
My laugh lines are not funny, the bags under my eyes aren’t welcome and double chins should have been left on the list of things that happen to women as we age (not to mention the host of dark hairs that sprout there after the age of 40.)
If women could pocket the monies spent on makeup foundation since the beginning of our time slapping on the stuff, we’d be richer than Oprah Winfrey.
It purports to blend like magic or last until the cows come home.
While most of us “know-it-alls” have found at least one ounce of a brand that works half the time, I’m still waiting for a company to use their breakthrough hocus pocus to “moo-ove” me with a foundation that also doesn’t slide off my face and into my lap in hot weather, ever.
This undoubtedly happened with incredible coincidence when, after years of not seeing a high school girl pal, I bumped into her at an outdoor concert in the hot July sun.
Before I could throw down a black circle from the cartoons and jump in, the jolt caused my otherwise youthful and lifted visage--courtesy of the latest technology—to slip off and down straight past my breasts already in south-mode and ricochet off my “Buddha,” (which was in competition with my spandex underwear) and land in the “gin on the rocks” I was holding in a plastic cup.
Stupidly, I took a drink from my glass hoping by some miracle I might regain my composure and that even though it looked like iced cappuccino, it wouldn’t taste like natural beige.
In the end though, losing face wasn’t as traumatic as I anticipated when as I took one horrible gulp, I realized that unlike the woman standing in front of me, at least my moustache was bleached and not black.
And thankfully I was still wearing a tried and true lipstick (tested innumerable times by the kisses of my Superman) that has allowed us both to leap tall buildings without losing its color.
Meanwhile, the psychologists and psychiatrists of the world tell us that we teach people how to treat us. This is true in many aspects of our lives, the least of which exists in mine when I am headlong into DIY projects.
Peter leaves me to my hive of industrious behavior because I’ve taught him that I can be a bit of a control freak in the departments of housecleaning and gardening.
His life is simpler and safer if he just lets me “bee.”
Case in point.
Eight willow tree trunks in my front yard have been eye-sores to me since I moved here with Pete last August. I mowed around them in frustration and left the weeds to grow around them purely out of spite.
I had always wished the trees had never been cut down and burned out all those years ago, but then I wasn’t living here and wasn’t the one who had to clean up the mess of broken branches which willows are notoriously known for dropping, even at the slightest breeze.
I had briefly envisioned making the old trunks into planters but the already overworked weed maintainer and flower garden technician in me said, “Whoa!”
Instead, I hired the local #1 tree-trunk-mulcher-guy, who then devoted hours of his time meticulously grinding up what was left of the “old girls.”
Unbeknownst to me, he also was going to neaten up the sawdust into heaps, easier for my hauling, before the mulching was done.
In the days that followed, as Pete and I sat outside admiring the great job done by the #1 tree-mulcher guy, I couldn’t figure out why there was only three small heaps of sawdust and what seemed like 18 million piles more waiting to be raked up.
“Oh, I told him he didn’t need to do it--that my wife would take care of it,” Pete replied.
Oh, white flag were art thou?