Beyond that, when patients aren't truly patients but merely customers willing to pay ridiculous sums for non-essential (i.e simply cosmetic) surgery to approximate them more closely to some socially accepted convention of perfection (or even more bizarrely to accentuate their likeness to someone else), I throw up metaphorical hands and arch a non-existent eyebrow in imitation of Carlo Ancelotti. (I am not an Everton fan but I move among them.)Of course I know everyone has a right to spend his/her money as (s)he wishes but many of the sums individuals spend on obsessive body mods are obscene and I think: wouldn't they feel equally good, if not better, about themselves if they donated the cash to those organisations that fill our week-end TV advertising slots with appeals for money to help Syrian and Yemeni war victim children in need of facial reconstruction and skin grafts?
Pablo Picasso's painted lady
The other thing I think is this: how depressing that perfectly attractive young women and men (but it is mostly women) feel they have to sign up for facial surgery, breast augmentation and all manner of procedures to move body fat from one place to another (flattening here, plumping there) or pay for regular botox injections just so they can have the same synthetic look and surface tension as all their plastic friends. Give me individuality, not identikittens! Sometimes (pre-Covid times, obviously), Blackpool's bars and restaurants on a Saturday night used to look like they'd been taken over by inhabitants from the Village of the Cloned. They'll all be saggy by forty with nothing but cold cream in their pension pots.Okay, in order for this not to descend too far into righteous moaning, let's lighten up and speculate as to what Picasso would have made of all this pursuit of surface beauty and perpetual youth. I think we know. Look at his own painted ladies (sample above). I suspect he would have thought (in Spanish, obviously): stay as natural as you are, be beautiful in your own right, and let imagination do the rest.
If you think that's a contrived segue, you are spot on. One of my favorite Far Side cartoons was this 'Boy Picasso' sketch of young Pablo coming home with a bad report for art....
Gary Larson's boy Picasso cartoon
So simple and yet so clever - like any stroke of genius - and ultimately forever satisfying. It could make me laugh every day (and not worry about the crinkles it induces). I hope it has the same effect on you.Right, I shall leave you with my latest poem. It was originally eight verses long but I've nipped and tucked it with surgical precision (LOL) into its present form. I've even thrown in a hint of Keats (whose life and works, two hundred years dead, we commemorated this week) in the title.
Truth Of Beauty"I'm worth it" she quipped with guile,handing him the bill. So many noughts!Tight-lipped, he couldn't crack a smile.
You'd have thought it had been his facerearranged so, under the surgeon's knife,and not his blandly perfect trophy wife's.
Thanks for reading. Always be natural, S ;-) Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook
