Thinking Out Loud
Beauty Sleep

January 22, 2012
By: Diane Szczepanski

"Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical."
Sophia Loren

Easy for Sophia to say. Look at her.

It ticks me off when someone gorgeous says something like that. It's the same as Donald Trump trying to tell me money isn't what makes us happy.

The movie I recently watched, really ticked me off too.

Natalie Portman woke next to Ashton Kutcher, while wearing a sweatpants outfit she looked adorable in and two hairs out of place. She was trying to portray her drowsy character as just waking from a rough night as she sleepily stretched. But, she merely achieved looking perfectly sexy and kittenish and 'disheveled', at worst.

If tomatoes had been nearby, I would have thrown them at the screen in retaliation of the film-maker having the audacity to think that I, or anyone else would perceive this as a believable scene.

Because I can't be alone when I say, just ONCE, I would like to wake up and not look like a wind-blown, mascara-smeared, bleary-eyed Yeti, with breath to match.

The image I face in the mirror each morning, is a scary, frightful thing.

It very well may explain why I am single.

Come to think of it, this may also have just explained my divorce...hhmmm...

At any rate, I don't know what happens during my nocturnal journey, that causes me to wake with an appearance of something the cat dragged in.

It has never seemed that I've slept with my face down and firmly mashed into a pillow, but apparently I do. Creases resembling a map of Chicago's famous 'Loop' have made their way onto my cheeks on a regular basis.

My baby fine, straight tresses, which were shiny and frankly, somewhat limp, when I laid down to rest, have mysteriously taken on a Medusa-like quality.

I am often convinced I've been knocked out by neighborhood hooligans who are in my bedroom with hand mixers. I think they perform some kind of weird initiation rite on my innocent hair, maybe to get passage into their little hooligan gang 'The HairRaisers'.

They do all this, while I dream of winning the lottery and being Mrs. Johnny Depp.

I'm sure of it.

I think I should just change my genre of movies I watch from here on in. It may be best to simply stay away from 'romantic comedies' with cute, tiny, young, leading ladies born from a great gene pool and who have the even greater benefit of forgiving camera lighting.

They just depress me.

Yes, I understand, movies are escapism, they're not meant to be taken literally.

But, what if I stuck with such films as 'Planet of the Apes' and 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame'? Or movies like 'Throw Momma From the Train'?

Maybe I'd quite being so hard on myself.

I might feel a whole lot better mornings knowing the person in the mirror staring back at me, while not remotely resembling cute and perky Natalie Portman, at least didn't look like...well, er...Momma...

Heck, it's worth a shot.

That and a well-stocked drawer of Maybelline should see me through this latest esteem crisis just fine.