another (commercial) audition -- sculptra

this one was at house on thursday afternoon for a new product that's hitting the market soon. really caught me totally off-guard. there was no script. they simply wanted me to talk onscreen about my idea of beauty. once i settled into my chair and slated, i was asked "does a beautiful woman look like?" what a huge question. it totally took me off-guard. my immediate response was, a beautiful woman is someone who takes what she's got and makes the most of it, no matter what it is. and when that happens, every woman is beautiful. but to tell you the truth, i actually had to stop and think about it. as i explained myself, what i said surprised me.

immediately, i thought of my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my aunts, my mother -- the first women i ever knew and spent any real time with. none of them ever wore make-up or had regular spa visits and yet to this day, i think of them as the most beautiful women that i have ever known. my Godmother, my aunt doris, in her twentysomething/thirtysomething prime was prettier than most women i know now.

why, she asked. more thinking.

they were lean and strong and healthy, as i recall. my great-grandmother would work all day in more than an acre in her backyard that was filled with vegetables and fruit and flowers, and she would do this in that south carolina sunshine, the kind of heat that made me dizzy as a child. she did that almost every day without a tractor -- unthinkable then and now for a woman her age. and that's not all she did.

i don't come from heavy-set, overweight people, either. when my aunt doris got married, she had to be all of a size 4, if that. there's a balance and a lankyness to us physically. but that's not it, either.

there was that unaffected natural approach to beauty. i understood at an early age that i didn't need to do anything or get anything to be pretty. there was an emphasis on cleanliness, order in the home and staying close to God. everyone had such pretty brown skin -- so clean and clear -- no matter how old they were. it was almost as though they were saying, this is who i am. no apologies, no excuses. this is it. if you don't like it, whatever. there's a lot of power in that.

she also asked me what i thought about plastic surgery and what i thought about the way i look at my age. as i'm jump-cutting through all this verbiage in my head to give her a clear-cut answer and tell her what i really think, i'm also thinking, where is this going? what kind of a commercial is this going to be? .

in the end, i don't think they're going to call me because my hair was natural. heck -- i was natural. they could surprise me. we'll see. what i'm really wondering about are the kind of answers they got from everyone else. it felt like a dove campaign for real beauty ad, not a commercial audition for a product that "plumps up" your facial skin.