I’m thinking of Woody Allen’s remark about the face of one his aunts looking “like something you’d find in a live bait store.” Woody knew that the funniest jokes are the cruelest and that every joke had to have a point. He was saying that life was grim and suppressive in ethnic, working-class Brooklyn, where they sure didn’t breed them for beauty.
Ditto to a somewhat lesser extent in Westfield, New Jersey, where I suffered through my childhood and mid-teen years.
When I was young almost all of the older people I ran into (suburban parents, teachers, merchants, civil servants) were not, shall we say, abundantly attractive. Certainly compared to the on-screen talent. None of them looked like Kirk Douglas or JFK or Dirk Bogarde or Jean Simmons or Elizabeth Ashley or Tony Curtis or Jeanne Moreau or Burt Lancaster.
I’m not saying our adult-aged neighbors were generally ugly but they certainly seemed homely and stessed and spiritually downcast and hardened by age or drink or cigarettes. Whatever glow or promise they had as youths had certainly been ground out of them. Well past their prime.
The men looked just as morose and imprisoned and regimentally dressed as the women. They were tidily or correctly attired and drove nice cars, but to me they seemed to behave like inmates of some huge, sprawling suburban concentration camp.
I was struck by this Times Square photo because this is what so many mothers, teachers and grandparents dressed like. (The Pat Nixon-like woman in the middle is clearly a Republican.) The idea seemed to be “our faces might look grim and puffy or hardened and resigned to an unwelcome fate, but our frumpy department-store clothing completes the effect.”
it was enough to put you off the idea of growing up and becoming an adult yourself.
From my gloomy, lemme-outta-here, eight-year-old perspective the deal seemed to be “if you study hard and follow the rules and obey your parents and get into a good college you too can grow up to look hemmed-in and compromised and dress frumpy…when you grow up you too can develop homely, chubby faces and adhere to the dreary social order of things…but only if you work hard and get really good grades. You don’t want to be left behind!