THE ART OF THE WAIT!

What is worse than going to the doctor’s office to “turn your head and cough” or hearing those immortal ear stimulating words that turns the average body to a quivering mass “put your feet up in the stirrups?” Waiting in line to do it! You would think that a culture that is so in tuned to having it all, and having it now, would have found a way to avoid having to stand in line!

Waiting and hopping from foot to foot is a great way to pass time and the benefits are untold. I think that’s how I learned to dance! Heck, you don’t even have to leave the house to spend your time waiting. If you’ve got a large family there is always a wait for bathroom time which is why the proper industrial strength bathroom door lock is so important. As you know most 5 year olds can pick nearly any door lock just by turning the knob. If yours doesn’t have the power, consider yourself fortunate. They do this mind you at the worst possible moment. It doesn’t matter how private or intimate the moment. The precious so and so’s can just make you just lose it. At least in the bathroom you’re in the right place!

Simply making a phone call can result in you practicing the art of the wait! Before call waiting the “busy signal was the height of disappointment. Today nothing can equal saying hello and spouting off your complaint in a well rehearsed diatribe and then realizing you’ve dialed into an automated phone system. Typically after you realize you’re talking to a machine the response goes like this:
“Thank you for calling Don and Fred’s Pulled Pork Stand. Your call is very important to us” (understood to mean: you’re a boob for interrupting our employees during our office’s big computer solitaire tournament). “Due to the great pig fiasco at Mrs. O’Leary’s Farm our representatives have been inundated with a high volume of calls. Please stay on the line and a representative will be with you shortly.”

Now if I’ve managed to figure out how to maneuver through the first fourteen levels of the automation by pounding the right buttons when prompted just to get to this message I’m vested! I gotta stay with the call to find out what kind of a fiasco can befall swine.
“There are 753 calls ahead of you and your approximate wait time will be a fortnight.”
I can feel the pressure building behind my eyeballs as they begin to protrude making me look like Marty Feldman on steroids.

In my high school yearbook the theme was “the line.” I should have known that it was a foreshadowing of greater things to come. It’s not the fact that you have to wait your turn that is frustrating. It’s more about sharing precious moments of your life surrounded by such colorful characters. I always manage to get behind either the guy who doesn’t know what a shower is, or the lady who is spending her time in line laughing. Unfortunately, she’s standing by herself. Someone is either stressed, angry, crazy, or stinky!

Typically long lines include the pressed for time guy. He’s hopping from foot to foot in a pressure paced tension to get to the front of the line. Usually you can see the vein bulging in his neck and even count the heartbeat pulsation if you gawk long enough. The one I chuckle at the most is the crazy dude. You know the Charles Manson look alike with the spooky stare in his eyes. He handles his time waiting in an even more tense fashion. It’s as if he’s too important to be forced to wait behind the dregs of society in the bank line just to be able to pick up money so he can get his months supply of peanut brittle. His favorite repeated and very audible sigh is “HUMPH!” I snicker very quietly to myself so as to not upset Charlie anymore.

The wacky woman who is going over her recipe for guacamole stew (out loud I might add) while asking her imaginary friend what they want for the dinner also amusingly helps pass the time. It also reminds me that I have to pick up a quart of milk, a lime and toenail clippers at my next stop. I breathe a deep sigh as I wait. “Great” I think, “I’m sure at the grocery store there will be another line!”

THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

Have you ever noticed that even though beauty may be in the eye of the beholder there are some folks whom the good fairy has touched with a magic prettiness wand? Bodies can be stunning but without a face to go with it the package becomes a reduced value in today’s society. We can all generally agree these specially blest individuals belong to the sect of beautiful people. Not only are they far and above better looking than us all but they flaunt a pretty power by only going to certain places while avoiding other select areas. Their presence can make an establishment chic or a location the in place. The rest of us schlogs and also-rans simply don’t measure up in the attractiveness pageant of life.

Universities are one example where you will find a higher percentage of beautiful people per capita. By sheer numbers good lookers are found in large colleges and educational settings. Perhaps beauty knows that education is a good thing. It’s either that or student’s parents send them away to college investing thousands in a sort of reverse cosmetic surgery procedure. Parents bank on college lore. Their secret desire is for their looker of a child to drink too much, party too much, and somehow ruin their stunning good looks in the college coed frat house.

On the sly, parents hope their kid will get in with the self-abusive roommate type in the dorm that can lead miss cuteness down the path toward the facially challenged. The parents are always less attractive than the coed they are paying to send to the institution of higher learning too. If your parents pushed you repeatedly in your high school years to “get a good education, go to college, make something of yourself” (all which are code words in their diabolically hideous and deceptive plan to ruin your beauty) now you know the real reason for their entire non-stop pushing and prodding. It is because you are better looking than them, or at least you were until you went to college and started the long slide into plainness. Want proof? Hold your college freshman yearbook picture in one hand and then look in the mirror. After the initial scream and jolt you’ll see the truth. Remember when you were more beautiful?

As you look back now I’m sure it’s clear why you noe hear the whispers from your contemporaries. “What happened to them” is a common phrase gently spoken between two of your colleagues as they snicker and work hard not to point noticeably at you. The one asking the question is always someone with more bugged out eyes or a disappointed disgusted look on their face. Remember this is all the work of your parents! Parents are the same couple of people who told us “I see you making that face behind my back. You better stop it or your face will get stuck that way!” They tell us so many stories its hard to know which ones are true!

There are certainly definable categories of good looks. The upper echelon involves the model kind of looks. This is the Christy Brinkly, Tyra Banks, Cheryl Tiegs type who have made a living with their face and form. Generally they are tall long legged beauties that are built with stick like figures reflecting their daily diet of rice cakes, scallions, bean sprouts and Diet Sprite soda portioned into quantities fit for feeding small animals or birds.

“You eat like a bird.” I remember that phrase my father use to tell me all the time when I was growing up. So averse to eating was I that I use to sneak off to the bathroom every night at dinner and not return until the plates were being cleared from the table. That could take hours! I could tell you stories about how to survive in a bathroom for days but that’s another column all together.

The food razzing eventually got my attention and I started eating more and more until I discovered I was in love with food. By then it was too late! That’s another one of those ways parents steal your beauty. They turn you on to some intoxicating substance knowing all the while that your above average youthful looks are doomed with the first bite of cheesecake. Ever wonder why the folks are always pleading with you to eat? Now you know!

The Farrah Fawcett types of individuals are in the Helen category. The term Helen is lifted from David Lance Goins 1987 writing that suggests that Helen of Troy, daughter of Zeus and Leda, had a face that ". . . launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium." Goins' conclusion is that “Here we have a useful, dispassionate, scientific measure of beauty: a helen. One helen is sufficient good looks to launch one thousand ships, and to cause the destruction by fire of an entire city.” It’s no wonder such beauty is often described by over zealous lonely men as “Smokin’! Those objectifying guys (which is another way to say all men) are always from one of the lesser looks variety that I am about to describe.

Beneath the Helen grouping is the generally good looking set of folks. Most of us in any lower class in the beauty procession of life would consider ourselves blessed to have a date with one of the good looking people. The next category into which most of us fall is the plain crowd. The unfortunate buggers on the descending scale next are the homely followed by the ugly and finally the eeewwwweeee what happened to them category.

Recently I was on a beach where one could view slinky blonds, lanky brunettes, and sultry redheads scantily clad in the latest fashion of skimpy swimwear showing as much skin as possible without being hauled off to jail for indecent exposure. Beauties go to the beach! It’s like a flesh smorgasbord. Find a nude beach and you’ve got Playboy Magazine live! For most of us beaches of any kind is a nice atmosphere as sun worshippers in all shapes and sizes enjoy this form of Mother Nature. Some of us however simply out rank others in the pursuit of age defying personage as we struggle to appear as if we have found the fountain of youth.

Take a look at the street where you live. There are certainly one or two people who could be considered truly beautiful. On my block there are a couple sets of those types (I put that in there so my neighbors will wonder who else (besides themselves) might win the “mirror mirror on the wall” contest. Some have it naturally; others work hard to achieve and maintain the gorgeousness mask. It is a mask you know. Eventually those who buy into all of this exterior beauty nonsense are destined to be disappointed. “Time will take its toll upon you no matter what.” That’s another one my parents drilled into my head. You could end up looking like Joan Rivers. She’s had so many facelifts that when her knees knock she gets a headache! Beauty should not be that important. Interior good looks are a much better quality. You have to be somebody who can see past all of the good looking flesh though in order to find that.

Sometimes you can look at a group of folks and see the physical beauty they once possessed. As the year goes by it becomes harder to detect. There is the young who stand the best chance of being a beauty. In adulthood we peak in our attractive physique. By middle age the wrinkles are starting to pop up like you made a face and it got stuck that way. Oh my goodness my parents were right!