Writing by Ear

I read a new term last night for those nose-to-mouth deep wrinkles that I euphemistically like to call “smile lines.”

“Marionette lines.”

That stopped me cold. Geez. Those are some baaaaadasssss lines.

Then it led me to The Sound of Music and the puppet show and looking up the lyrics.

You can actually download The Lonely Goatherd as a ringtone – how fun is that? If I had a phone sophisticated enough to let you download ringtones, I might just have to do that. Maybe I’d smile the once-a month my cell phone rings instead of thinking, “Oh sh–.” (My mother cannot keep it straight that my one sister wants to be called exclusively on her cell phone and I never want called on my cell phone, which is always in my purse and has a ringer I can’t hear even on its loudest setting. So she’ll call it, leave a message, and I won’t know for days. Or until the middle of the night when I hear a brief vibrating, buzzing sound every minute or so and figure out it’s coming from my purse. Plus she hasn’t figured out that voicemail is not the same as an answering machine. So she’ll say “Hello, this is mother…..[pause]….are you there? Then wait for a while to see if I pick up. Then leave her message.)

(I just checked my phone now, in my purse, and of course it’s dead.)

But anyway, back to those lines… I’ve just started attacking mine recently with two different types of spackle. Even at drugstore (Wal-Mart) prices, I cringed to buy them. So I’ll be using every drop, effective or not. And I figure it may take a few years to work my way through the various options on the market to see if anything really makes me feel like I”m keeping my face from imploding.

Oh, and neither of these products has sunscreen. So I’m apparently supposed to spread more goo on my face on top of those. (People can actually do that without causing major eruptions?) I had good skin until my 20s, then it all went horribly wrong. A little sunburn is about the only thing that makes it look good.

In the ”How Obsessive Are You About Your Skin?” quiz that was the source of the “marionette lines” line, I turned out to be a low-to-medium-maintenance kind of gal. What I really need is high-maintenance funds — I’d be at Dr. Rey’s office so fast asking…”What can you inject here, plane off there, and reconstruct in this general area (neck up)?”

But no, I”m kidding. If I had that kind of money I’d be hard-pressed to spend it that way. Not when there’s a front porch that needs rebuilding and an attic to revamp and a garage roof gone bad, and on and on. “Cottage Industry” will always trump “Smile Lines.”

It’s just how I’m strung.

Your wrinkles either show that you’re nasty, cranky,
and senile, or that you’re always smiling.
                                                  ~ Carlos Santana