You’d think in a civilized society that women would be more acceptable, even beautiful, to others without having to wear a mask, deviously called make up. In a civilized society, one would see beyond the chemical contrivances and bear witness to each person’s soul. After all, we all will look more or less the same amount of dead laying on a coroner’s slab, made up or not.

My genetics state that there were a long line of females before me who wore cosmetics to improve their looks. My genetics also state that if there ever came a day when my face didn’t break out regularly into zits I’d pack the face paints away. Several surgeries and a year of Proactiv later, my skin looks pretty good, so unless someone either gets hitched or is pushing daisies, I rarely touch my facial minerals. You’ll understand, then, why the Motor Vehicle Division in our small town thought my husband might be seeing a new gal when this one decided to remake the face she’d normally been seen bare with.

When I was a teenager no one really showed me how to apply foreign goop to my face, so I learned from the usual media. The media must have been Boy George singing on New Year’s Eve and Cindi Lauper, because I remember several adults referring to my eyeshadow job as the NBC peacock. I became much better, thank goodness not only for me but for my viewers; however, it doesn’t appear that a well-done face job is like having the skill of bicycle riding where it comes back to you no matter how old you are. (By the way, I have to disagree with that adage – I nearly killed myself last time I took up bicycle riding.) Now it apparently takes me forty-five minutes what used to take ten. I broke my mascara wand, and my white porcelain sink and countertop is covered in fine, earth-and-flesh-toned powders. Usually I am waiting on my husband while he preens; now he is waiting on me, albeit patiently, while I blend and wipe and scrape and scream.

For all the work, though, and a few near-expletives thrown in, I took a photo that looks like a deer in the headlights – the same look on my drivers’ license as four years ago. I guess it was fairly worth it.