Inner Beauty, You Elusive Unicorn! 

Gestation: 12 Weeks, 2 Days

 
Over a plate of Sake Kasu Chilean seabass with shitake mushroom tapenade at Chaya Brasserie in the heart of Beverly Hills I bathe my friend Georgia in a fiery attention.

We’re both the mothers of small children whose husbands are watching them. This is the first conversation in three and half years we’ve been able to finish without interruption.

What Georgia is saying that has me in such thrall is that there are not too many people who have sympathy for, and I quote, “the downfall of good looking women.”

What she’s talking about is how, in becoming the mother of two boys, respectively nine-months and three-and-a-half years old, she has lost her sexy mojo.

That she’s become aged and sloppy, forgetting to comb her hair, wear make-up and make sure that all the vomit is cleaned off the back of her track suit. That in becoming a mother bumping up against forty she’s become invisible.

Yet who will empathize? Who will sling an arm about her shoulders and commiserate, acknowledging that it must be awful that for most of Georgia’s pubescent and adult life men threw themselves at her feet and now the only one fumbling with her bra-strap is teething and drools like a Bassett Hound.

I’ll tell you who will empathize. Me.

 

• Homecoming Queen of 1983.
• Dater of cruelly handsome men.
• Back-up dancer for INXS at the 1990 MTV music video awards; a “Suicide Blonde” with a bad wig that kept slipping off in front of the audience in the packed Universal Amphitheatre. 
• The actress who played Madge in Picnic at the Longwharf Theater in 1991; Madge being the character who caused her brainy sister, Millie, to cry out, “Madge is the pretty one, Madge is the pretty one!”

And now? The other day I found myself standing at the meat counter of Bristol Farms contemplating the New Zealand rack of lamb, grateful there was no line. Just me and a lovely, young African American woman and five butchers. Five Butchers.

“Hello?  Hello?” I cried.

 
All five butchers were helping the pretty black woman. She was wearing a hot pink J. Lo sweatsuit that stretched with pinpoint precision across the incredibly lush, rounded homunculus of her derriere. A derriere one could serve tea on or seek shade beneath on a sultry summer day. Her breasts stood at attention, saluting the butchers in admiration of their slicing and packaging expertise. Their vast knowledge of beef.

Taking a respite from the rack of lamb, which I would not be getting until Proprietor of the Hot Butter Biscuit Booty had left with her veal cutlets, I reviewed my own breasts; once perfect p’s.

• Perky
• Pert
• Pertinacious
• Playful
• Provocative
• Precocious …
• Poignant.

That was before the birth of my child and my relationship with the infernal hospital grade breast pump that could stretch the most obdurate nipple a good three inches. I’m thirty-eight years old now, three months pregnant with my second child, wrangling a toddler at home.  My breasts are still p’s. Plundered. Plummeting. Paltry. Let’s face it…pitiful. 

Looking up from the wreckage of my bustline, I spied a nineteen-year old blonde wearing a half-t and Juicy short shorts aiming her shopping cart toward the meat counter. Just to be safe, I took a number.

*****

As our dinner plates are cleared away, I assure Georgia that we’re not ready for the glue factory yet. We’ve still got “it.”  But I don’t really believe it, as evidenced by the ordering and consuming of the triple layer Chocolate Sin Cake for dessert.

I’m going down with the ship. There’ll be no J. Lo sweatsuit gracing this pregnant ass, rather an ever-thickening layer of mattress-like cellulite as I amass the forty plus pounds on the road to the birth of my second child … and a chance to accept a whole new kind of beautiful.

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