A Guest at the Wedding

If you’re going to the royal wedding even in your mind. it’s not enough to make the appropriate gestures. I tried the royal wave but it just looked like I was hailing a cab.Also you can’t just smile your same goofy smile  like some camp counselor so I got that wrong too, see?What you have to do really  is sit up straight,suck in your stomach,then sit up even straighter.  Really though?  Really it’s all about the hat.:-)

Makeup or No Makeup

It’s probably best to let yourself be photographed warts and forget all vanity. My Sixth Grade school picture showed me with such a bad case of chapped lips I looked like a circus clown. I didn't care. I had just gotten a dog  and that dog was all I thought about.I think of Martin Schoeller who does these outsized close-ups of people, using none of the tricks photographers usually use to soften the blunt facts of the human face. They’re fascinating. Take a look at Christopher Walken here. The key to so many of his roles has to be that upper lip that Nature hiked up crookedly on him.And was Bill Murray actually trying to be funny in all his movies or did we laugh because of the odd mixture of that tentative smile and a certain hapless look signaled by the tilt of his eyebrows?I put Martin Schoeller’s photo of Brad Pitt up here a few days ago and now here’s his lady:Look at that face! She is one beautiful woman and kind too, as I hear (and to  those people who nastily suggest  say she is working out old issues in rearing six children under ten I say  what is anyone doing but exactly that?) As a child she wasn’t all that pretty as you can see . It just goes to show you: by the time you're a grownup you really DO have the face you deserve.

New Lows from TigerTown

My vote is it’s creepy, Nike’s new ad featuring a mute Tiger Woods staring morosely into the camera while his dead father’s voice seems to be giving him a sober ‘talking-to’. Take a look  below if you haven’t seen it. (And  I used to think Natalie Cole singing duets with a father many decades in the ground was a little unsettling!)  An ad expert  raved on about how brilliant the Nike ad is on the Today Show just now but to me Tiger’s sorryface has the same authenticity as the segment a few minutes later showing the dog who could smile. Well the dog once sort of seemed to be smiling over a plate of food and its owner captured it on camera. It didn’t smile on the Today Show of course. It just has one of those wide straight-line mouths like George Washington’s in the Gilbert Stuart portrait that, with a slight twitch of a cheek muscle, could sort of turn up into something resemble a smile.Making an ad is hard work especially when the shot is this tight. It maybe took eight or ten takes before the Nike people got the look they wanted and chances are the guy was more bored or exasperated than anything else underneath the Emmett Kelly face. Is he sorry about this whole huge mess? I dare say he’s sorry! Should his remorse be used to sell shoes, effect a little damage control for this huge corporation long associated with him.? Well it sure rubs me the wrong way. I was fixin’ to buy some of those nice leg toning sneakers that build muscle clear to the glutes and I'd been looking for a while at Nike's Shox Turbo shoe. Instead I think I’ll head for the Skechers aisle; anyway they also throw in pretty sparkles on the sides.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIYejgkqd0o]

Tiger You Cad, We Forgive You

My man flew south today to go to the Masters and see naughty little Tiger in the flesh. Isn't it just so typical what we've done with him though? First he gets put on this big pedestal and treated like a god; then he gets exposed as being – well gosh, flawed after all! a mere messed-up mortal like the rest of us! Now we see him on TV Monday doing his mea culpas and everything will change again.Glorify. Bring down. Forgive again: We do it all the time. We did it with Nancy Kerrigan when she skated her way into our hearts at the 1994 Olympics (and of course it didn’t hurt that the hubby of her adversary-on-the-ice Tonya Harding arranged to have her whacked in the legs at that practice session.) But remember when she was flown to that Heaven For Athletes Disney World and on a float with the giant-headed Mickey was seen mouthing the words, "This is so corny”? People were awful about it. You’d have thought she was a baby-killer, a traitor to the country and the Whore of Babylon rolled into one.We got some perspective about that finally but still. They say in the PR world that any kind of press is good press. I bet Nancy and Tiger don’t feel that way. Anyway Nancy is what she always was: a kind and gracious person. Tonya seems to be what Tonya has always been too: an inventor of excuses to prove that nothing’s her fault.As for Tiger, maybe fame caused him to lose his bearings and go all crazy for sexual encounters and maybe he would have behaved that way anyway. He sure wouldn’t be the first guy. Anyway that’s his personal life. I say let the kid play golf and keep your speculations to yourself. But hey Dave, see if you can get a picture! (Or else I'll photo-shop him into this one ha ha)