The Friend Who Got Away

I've been reading this book called "The Friend Who Got Away," full of 20 personal essays by women who talk about friendships that blew up or faded away for one reason or another. So, I've been doing a lot of thinking about a particular friendship of mine that fell apart. Most of the time, it's too painful to think about, but I'm trying to write my own essay about it. When I do, I'll share it here.

The Perfect Foundation

Sorry, I know you saw the title of this post and figured it was something about my spiritual bedrock or how my home is built. No, it's about makeup.

In sixth grade when I first started dabbling in foundation (or base, as we call it in Georgia), my aunt took me to the mall for a proper color match at Merle Norman, THE place to buy makeup for women in the 1980s. Well, the beauty consultant said she simply couldn't find a base light enough to match my skin and then slathered some orange shade on my jawline. She then quoted a price for the bottle and began to ring me up. I told her no thank you and walked out. 

As I left the mall with my aunt, I swear I heard Merle Norman whisper, "You will nevuh, evuh find the right base for your face. Mwahahahahahahaha."

I spent the next 25 years buying various shades of porcelain, bisque and ivory from drugstores and grocery stores. Last year, I'd had enough. It was time to buy a foundation without a coupon. Only a store such as Sephora--with its endless inventory of overpriced bottled beauty--could solve this problem. I did my research. Sephora's customers recommended Lancome's Teint Idole above all other bases. I bought the lightest shade (ivoire) and rejoiced in knowing that my troubles were over.

Wrong.

It was heavy. REALLY heavy. I powered through, convinced that "women of a certain age" probably needed a little more coverage, right? After I applied a mask of it, the stuff wouldn't come off my fingertips. Even AFTER soap and water, the Lancome was stuck in the ridges. My fingerprints weren't my own anymore. I pictured CSI detectives saying, "We know Anna committed the crime, but there's no way to pin it on her. The prints don't match. How is that possible?"

The Lancome sat in my bathroom closet. Like the crazy wife in the attic in "Jane Eyre." I couldn't throw it away, but I couldn't look at it, either. 

Then last week I read a magazinze article about how NOBODY even wears foundation anymore. It's all about tinted moisturizer. Wha??? Since I'm turning 40 this year, I've been expecting these sorts of revelations and hard-earned pearls of wisdom to flow my way. But, really, NO MORE FOUNDATION? I hadn't expected this level of change.

So, I went to the Sephora site (again) and ordered Laura Mercier's oil-free tinted moisturizer in the shade of "nude." It came in the mail yesterday in a sleek chocolate tube. This glorious product is gracing my face today for the first time. OH MY WORD. Now I can check "find the perfect foundation" off my "500 Things to do Before I Die" list. Actually, I scribbled it out, because foundation wasn't even what I was looking for. And that glass bottle of Lancome is sitting at the bottom of the trash can.

Moral of the story: Don't search so hard for the foundation that you miss the tinted moisturizer.

Teeth of the Hydra

My best friend Jenny James has always told me I have the teeth of the hydra.* She said that means I give folks a lot of chances before "going all hydra" and putting people in their place.

"I am amazed at the [crap] you will put up with before you just tear someone apart point by point," she said. "And once the teeth of the hydra come out, it's ON."

Jenny makes being a many-headed sea monster sound acceptable, almost like being a ninja.

Admittedly, I do like to store up a laundry list of someone's past transgressions before unleashing via bulleted email. More than once, I've typed a diatribe to someone and then immediately forwarded it to Jenny with the simple subject line of "hydra." No need to read the email. That one word sums up all the paragraphs contained within. "Hydra" is also a shorthand way to describe any occasion in which someone gets a dressing down. As in, "Oh, Momma went ALL hydra on that waitress at Chili's last night. You shoulda seen it!"

Jenny gave me a hydra incense burner for my birthday a few years ago and took great pains to glue extra big teeth on the many-headed monster. When you light the incense, it breathes smoke out of its many mouths. Probably my favorite birthday present ever.  

While I do recognize the need for clearing the air when a situation warrants it, I try not to go all hydra more than once or twice a year. As Jenny says, "Sometimes, all you gotta do is just show a little hydra fang and they back off." 

* The phrase dates back to 1972 (also the year of my birth) in the song "Bang a Gong" by British rock band T Rex. The lyric goes "You got the teeth of the hydra upon you."