Paradise Preoccupied

I saw a couple of clips from the Correspondent’s Dinner last night during the three hours of hours of CNN we get on Sundays here. David Letterman‘s “Top 10 GW Bush Moments” was all it should have been, with Dave having to do nothing but the countdown … the President did the rest, and I have no doubt there was a lot of debate during the whittling-down process to end up with only ten major embarrassments.

I was a bit surprised to hear that Rich Little is still doing gigs … he must be, what?, 70 by now? … but almost fell off my chair when I saw him. How much surgery has that guy had? He looks like some pod-person-mutant-manufactured version of the Rich Little I remember; vaguely familiar, but in a horribly-abused-by-surgery sort of way.

I’ll go off on politics in some other post, but I’m feeling compelled to address the topic of Rich Little’s face, and I have to ask some questions:

When did “freak” become more acceptable a look than “mature”?

Is a distorted and disturbing version of twenty-five honestly considered more attractive than a healthy look of sixty-five?

And …

Does no one own a mirror anymore?

A few years ago, Mark and I were in L.A., and invited to attend a big hoo-hah benefit event — one of those thousands-of-dollars-per-plate things — for Cedars Sinai Hospital’s breast cancer program. It was totally Hollywood, with Jay Leno as MC and music by, among others, Sting.

It had been a while since I’d rubbed shoulders with Tinsel Town’s rich and famous, so like every experience in the US after a few years of isolation on this island, there’s a door marked ‘Culture Shock’ that I must pass through before I’m back into the swing of my old American rhythm.

I suppose because it was a medical-related do, the older folks were out in force. There was enough fur in the place to keep the population of Fairbanks toasty … remember, this was Los Angeles in May or June; I can’t recall the exact date, but it was heading toward a SoCal summer … and such an abundance of jewelry that the tinkling of a hundred crystal chandeliers during an 8.2 earthquake would have been drowned out by the jingling.

What struck me, however, was not the gold, diamonds, pelts, original gowns, and household names … Larry King was at the next table … it was the faces, almost every one of which had been tugged back so far that mouths were stretched to close to twice their width and eyes had all gone Asian.

When these victims of the illusion of perpetual youth spoke, it was like watching South Park Canadians flapping away, the faces came that close to splitting completely in two. That look added to the Botox freeze … all expression killed at the root, so nary a nerve left to raise an eyebrow or indicate pleasure or dis … had the crowd looking distinctly alien, and not a little ugly.

Is this what California has come to? The Emperor’s New Face?

One of the women sharing our table, the wife of a dead star who’s parlayed her widowhood into minor celeb status, must be pushing 80. The signs of repeated nipping and tucking and deadening can not be missed, but the bizarreness of her face goes strangely well with the rest of her. On this evening, she was wearing a skin-tight gold lamé mini-dress with stiletto heals, and had her hair up in two pigtails with fluffy bangs.

Oh, my.