Body Parts, Check!

If LA put out a wanted ad, it would go something like this: "Please be insecure."

We nitpick everything about a person, we tell them what to wear, who to date, what to do, and most importantly what your body should look like. This is the land of inflation and deflation, literally. Blow up your boobs, blow up your ass, blow up your lips, but deflate those thighs, that waist, and that brain. This is a city about alteration, about plastic perfection painted on insecure individuals. We take a pretty woman and seek to make her "beautiful" by industry standards, though those standards have become rather skewed. Whose beauty are we trying to emulate? Even LA cant decide. One moment we want that actresses lips, and the next we want her breasts, and her ass, and her eyebrows, and her tan, and her hair, then the next day we have found a new actress to torment over. It has become so bad that we have created a slew of Frankensteins brides. Woman who have done so much to their face that they have a perpetual fish pucker and skin stretched so tight a corpse would be envious.

No one knows who we are suppose to look like in the City of Angels, just not ourselves, never ourselves. African American women are bleached here to look whiter, and Caucasian women are tanned to look darker. Ethnic is in one day, and out the other. Pale is so heroin, but smoke it up because this week its so on. If you don't have long thick hair, we can fix that with extensions, clip ons, and weaves; we can even do this for your eyelashes. Thicker, bigger, more. And please, if you can, be skinny, but not crack whore New York skinny because LA doesn't want to be New York, just be skinny enough to fit in a size 0 because as we all know the camera adds 10 lbs to women, and only women. So you go ahead and eat up that roast beef sandwich boys because it makes you look distinguished, and if those women ask for scraps you just tell them that they look fat...and need bigger tits. That's right girls, you need tits, so raise them up, push them out, tweak them to be bigger, but flaunt them, make them want it, bend over it, strip it down, and please oh please learn how to flaunt a bikini because Snap Snap the Paparazzi are loving you and hating you in their trashy mags. Furthermore, if you so decide that skinny is not your thing, then be fit. Worship that gym, because the city will, and I mean IT WILL, judge you wherever you go in its confines. A heavy set women, whom I use to work with, told me once, "I am so glad that I am obese, because I know I am fat and people just end up accepting that, but for women who are average they have to fight the stigma of being skinnier so much more." Amen, sister. If you are average, then come to LA, we will cure you of that ailment, and if not, well there are a plethora of shrinks here that you can cry to. Just make sure you don't wrinkle your face when you do so. LA hates wrinkles. And LA hates women over thirty. So lets fix that, pass the needle, dripping with botulism. It's pretend time. So lets pretend with Botox. Glorious, glorious botox.

Even I fell into the slump of not-feeling-perfect-enough-for-LA. I had a wrinkle on my forehead and I obsessed about it as I was surrounded by these smooth faces. How dare I look my age. HOW DARE I. The one time I got botox, the pesky wrinkle disappeared within minutes, and I was 100% sold on this miracle in a syringe. Then the next day I couldn't move my eyebrows up, not even a fraction of an inch. I cant even begin to express how absolutely terrifying it is to not be able to move your facial muscles when you have been moving them for thirty years. I called the doctor in a panic, and their response was, " Don't worry about it, its normal, plus its scientifically shown that botox will make you less depressed because now you don't frown." Yeah, that's exactly what I was feeling at the moment, less depressed. Eventually I got use to it. I mean, I did have a perfectly smooth forehead after all, and as my mother would say, "Beauty is pain." Today I think that would translate into, "Beauty is augmentation."

The problem with Botox is that it can be overtly done, and that is where the real fault lies in this pursuit of being flawless. LA allows people to OVERDO things. So much so that people can't smile, can't express, and sometimes end up with wonky eye syndrome (because the Botox disables them from blinking properly). People are so desperate to maintain a facade that they will do anything, even if that anything ends up damaging them. The key is moderation, research, and knowledge. Keep things simple, make sure you know your doctor, and make sure you know the risks. Most everything can be done well and can be done right, but if one doesn't do their homework and rushes into things, disasters can happen. And unfortunately those disasters can lead to permanent disfigurement.

Sometimes I wonder if some of these plastic surgeons are offspring of Nazi Dr. Mengele, because some of these people have mutilated their faces so much in the pursuit of perfection that they no longer look human, and while they obviously suffer from an image psychosis, who are these doctors that continue to operate on them? Who continued to whittle away Michael Jackson's nose, who created the infamous Cat woman? I suppose money talks, and celebrities have hordes of it to spend on being a supposed ideal, but somewhere along the way, someone has to wonder if the doctors themselves aren't somehow sickly perverse. I guarantee you a tenth of them use to cut up little animals as children. I just want to say to them, put down the scalpel already, you took a Hippocratic oath! Or maybe I am wrong, maybe plastic surgeons don't have to, and that is why we end up getting doctors who transform their clients into strange corpse like figures and blow up dolls. Poor blow up dolls, they get such a bad rep for peoples perversions. Mind you, not all plastic surgeons are bad, but in a land chalk full of them, not all of them are good either. And some of them are down right bad to the point of serial.

I wish I could tell these people that we all look beautiful. That ten years ago, and twenty years ago and so on and so forth, enhanced beauty was found through simple things like makeup, and it was OK to be voluptuous, or even "average"; that beauty was found in the natural features of the person, and that aging was a beautiful process of life. I wish I could believe in the theory that "God made us perfect", but Los Angeles society argues differently. Instead, I feel sorry for the youths that grow up in LA and are made to feel that they have to change, for the people who never succeed here but desperately tried to by going underneath the knife, and for the housewives who feel augmentation will help them keep their husbands. I wonder, when all is said and done, if they will love their new selves when they look in the mirror, or miss their old?

Then again, I didn't miss that wrinkle.