When Dick Cheney shot a fellow hunter in the face recently, Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” commented that it was times like those that made him feel guilty for cashing his paycheck–his job was that easy. As I walked out of our kitchen the other day, suddenly I knew exactly how he felt: standing there before me was my very own gift to column writing, my daughter, Clementine. Or perhaps I should say a reasonable facsimile of my daughter, Clementine, as the person standing before me had absolutely no eyebrows, and I was certain that the last time I had checked, my daughter did. Quite nice ones, too.
It was like stepping into a re-enactment of Pink Floyd’s The Wall: I half expected her to start singing, “Are there any queers in the audience tonight? Get them up against the wall!” When she didn’t, I went ahead and asked the question that I already knew had no answer: “Why?” As I had suspected, the answer was a shrug and a “I dunno”.
I could accept this, perhaps because as a fellow female, I, too, have made more than my share of bad fashion choices over the years: everything from fluorescent pink leg warmers, to shaving my arms, to the dreaded 1980s “schlong” haircut (short on top, long on the sides). My husband, on the other hand, was not so understanding: he seemed to take it as a personal affront. (He also failed to appreciate that, by Clementine cutting off her own eyebrows we had dodged a bullet: usually when unauthorized eyebrow excisement takes place it takes place on the faces of younger, gullible siblings–and frequently involves not just the eyebrows, but every single hair on the head. The thought that it could be a bald-headed Clyde standing before us, however, failed to mollify him).
“Why would she do that? Why?” he kept asking. I’m not sure if he was more upset with her shrugged “I dunno” or my unconcerned, “I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time–maybe she was hot, like Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite.”
Whether or not it was the heat that made her do it, in one sense she was like Pedro–it wasn’t long before she regretted what she had done. She didn’t exactly say this, but I got the idea when she came out of her room the next morning with a brand new set of eyebrows drawn onto her face. You’d think that, as upset as my husband had been by the eyebrow removal, he would have been happier about their reappearance, but this just wasn’t the case–if anything, he was more upset than ever. Of course, this might have had something to do with the fact that, in her enthusiasm, Clementine had given herself more than Nature had intended–much more. Now she no longer looked like Bob Geldof; she looked like Groucho Marx. Again I expected her to start quoting movie lines, only now something along the lines of: “I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. What he was doing in my pajamas I’ll never know.”
Of course, the nice thing is that it doesn’t really matter which model she follows: the Bob Geldof or the Groucho one, since both of them turned out pretty well. Geldof even managed to get himself knighted for his work with Live Aid, and although Groucho did develop some strange habits in his old age–including hanging out with Alice Cooper–at least he kept his sense of humor until the end.
Which is what, eventually, my husband regained as well–right after he saw how it looked when Clementine combined her three inches of ballpoint eyebrows with a pair of dark glasses to hide behind.
In fact, he was laughing so hard he could hardly hear her answer to his gasped out: “Why?” Maybe I dunno really was the “secret woid”.