STOP! The Insanity!

I stood in the magazine store laughing my ass off. Usually, I don't laugh my ass off - I just kind of giggle or chuckle -- unless I am watching Vince Gatton in the play FULLY COMMITTED -- it's the way I have become. I just kind of laugh... unless it is really, really funny. This was really, really funny.

I love Nicole Kidman. I love, love, love her. She is a brilliant actress and a great movie star. I felt like she was robbed of the Oscar for MOULIN ROUGE but she was vindicated when she got the Oscar for THE HOURS (which she deserved, I felt, even though Renee Zellwegger was robbed of her Oscar for CHICAGO, just as Nicole had been robbed of her). No amount of love for a person can stop me from saying

"What the fuck did she do to her face?!"

The beautiful people of Hollywood make me so angry when they fuck up their faces. Age is a beautiful thing and one which we must all deal with. Just deal with it! Just deal with it.. GRACEFULLY. I know that there are people who have had their faces tweaked... but just tweaked, ok? Recently Jane Seymour copped to having had excess skin removed from under her eyes. Angela Lansbury admitted to having a light lift back in the eighties because she felt like she was looking so old she might lose her husband. Julie Christie has owned up to having her chin tucked. I don't know if she has ever said anything about it but I have heard it said that "Blythe Danner had a good face during the eighties and she stopped there." It happens...GRACEFULLY.

Then there are the people who do it and hate it and talk about it. I read in an interview that Amy Brenneman tried botox -- and then was upset because her face muscles didn't work properly. If I remember correctly, she said something like: "I get paid a lot of money to move those face muscles and if they don't work, I can't work" and finishing up by saying she would NOT do it again.

Last night, we were watching Dancing With The Stars and my favourite actress and the prettiest girl in Hollywood popped up on screen doing a Nutrogena ad. I dont usually operate in absolutes.. I think all women are beautiful. On this issue, I cannot be swayed. Diane Lane is the prettiest girl in Hollywood. She was on my tv, talking, and HER EYEBROWS MOVE! She has not tweaked her face. Neither have Sally Field and her BROTHERS AND SISTERS co-star Patricia Wettig... or Angela Bassett, Diane Keaton, Annette Bening, Joan Allen, Stockard Channing, Alfre Woodard, Kate Mulgrew. I'm not sure ANY asian women have facial surgeries -- my girls don't age like caucasians, look at Nancy Kwan, Jodi Long, Rosalind Chao, Michell Yeoh, France Nuyen -- all asian women of varying ages who look AMAZING. I am not their surgeons, I don't know who hasn't had work - for that matter, I don't know who HAS had work, except for the glaringly obvious. It HURTS me when I look at old Meg Ryan movies. I think to myself "imagine being her child and coming to kiss mommy good morning and seeing a face you don't know". I am a DIE-HARD Melanie Griffith fan and it makes me heartsick, what she has done to her face. It hurts. It burns us.

It's different in Europe. Again, I can't swear to anything but I look at Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau, Fanny Ardant and Juliette Binoche and I am sure they wouldn't, they haven't. The great and gorgeous English actresses like Dame Maggie, Judi Parfitt, Emma Thompson and my beloved Judi wouldn't -- it might fuck up their ability to act! So what is it about show business in America that makes us mutilate ourselves this way? Oh, I know... don't get me wrong. I know. This is a youth obsessed country. It's all in the magazines and the latest tv shows. I'm a gay man living in New York city, I know about wanting to be young and beautiful. I want to be beautiful every day, otherwise I wouldn't go to the gym as often as I do. I have to be, to fit in with "my people". BUT ... and this is a big but ... I would NEVER let a surgeon near this face. I am not vain. I have had a lifelong relationship with low self-esteem (which I seem to be 90% near conquering, in 2007) but, even so, I have always recognized that I have my mother's face and since I hail her as the prettiest girl I have EVER seen, I would never let someone near my face with a scalpel, a needle or even a chemical peel. IMAGINE someone fucking up on MY face. I ain't about to walk around looking like Bruce Jenner. Besides, I think that the sexiest men in film and tv these days are Tim Daly (age 51), Scott Bakula (53), Blair Underwood (43), Ed Harris (57), Ken Watanabe (48) and the ever-gorgeous Gregory Harrison (57). I don't THINK any of these guys have had any work done - but, like I said, I ain't their surgeon.

This morning I turned on my computer, where TMZ had a link to a story they did about plastic surgery nightmares. I swiped some of their photos to show in this blog. Then I swiped a pic of the prettiest girl in Hollywood to illustrate that aging naturally is BEAUTIFUL. Then I snapped a pic of the magazine cover that had made me laugh my ASS off, alongside the back page of a magazine that, coincidentally, I bought at the same time.

PAINFUL. The laughter AND the cause of that laughter.