There’s a Bruce Handy q & a with Mad Men‘s Jessica Pare (i.e., Megan) in the July 2012 Vanity Fair, and on the website there’s a video piece about her. I knew going in that the subject of Pare’s rabbit teeth would not even be alluded to, much less touched upon. But honestly? As much as I admire & enjoy Pare’s work on Mad Men, her teeth are the first thing I see when she comes to mind. Followed by her eyes, hair and speaking voice. And then “Zou bisou bisou.”

And what’s wrong with having rabbit teeth (or ‘rather prominent front teeth,’ which is how a guy in the mid ’60s described the chompers of Patti Boyd Harrison, who had worked as a model before marrying George Harrison)? Absolutely nothing. You could argue, in fact, that Pare’s teeth are what give her beauty a distinctive edge. Don’t modify or hide a physical trait — flaunt it! But the reason Pare is in Vanity Fair is not, right now, because she’s the new Meryl Streep — it’s because she’s very particular and believable in Mad Men but primarily because she’s hot in a kind of mid-60ish way. (The VF copy calls her “a French-Canadian firecracker.”)

You know that if Pare was just starting to happen as an actress in the mid ’60s, the first thing her manager would tell her would be to “go to a dentist and file your teeth down and even them out a bit.” Not so much today and that’s fine, but any guy who says he wouldn’t be at least thinking about the possible pitfalls of receiving oral sex from Pare if he was seeing her in real life is a liar.

I’m sorry that it has to fall to me to bring this stuff up, but, like I said, it was absolutely assured going in that Handy wouldn’t touch Pare’s dental issue with a ten-foot pole. Honestly? If I were Pare I would probably ask my dentist for a slight modification. Just to take the fear factor out, so to speak. Would this interfere with Pare’s Pare-ness? A tiny bit, yes, but every actress has her edges sanded down when she becomes famous. At least slightly. Are you going to tell me that the Kate Winslet of 2012 looks even faintly like that carrot-haired actress in Heavenly Creatures? Look at Kristen Stewart‘s glammed-up, heavily made-over appearance on the cover of the July Vanity Fair. She looks hot, all right, but are you going to tell that me that her special Stewart-ness hasn’t been all but smothered?

Patti Boyd Harrison during a visit she and George Harrison made to San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district in August 1967.