Facepainting and facelifting--not weight lifting.

Now and Zen: Sick and tired of being sick and tired--and anonymous.Today I performed the well-renowned art of facepainting at the educational institution at which I slave. The children were very vulnerable and cute, and at times I thought of myself as a make up artist, concentrating with Gaugin flair on the canvas. It was when I had to render a dinosaur on the cheek of a five-year-old that things got rough. Put those spikey humps in the right place, and all is well.

This week I demonstrated with 1499 of my cohorts in San Francisco Unified School District on Van Ness and Mc Allister. We all wore our blue white and red T-shirts and carried signs. My sign was actually written and conceived by another teacher but she gave it to me to embellish. It read "Give him back to Hollywood" and I added "better yet: Austria." They put my picture on the www.uesf.org (see below) as one of the demonstrators. I don't want to get into the socio-political suggestions in the sign right now because I really want to talk about superficial things like age and how people look. But I suppose how people look has something to do with the sign. If one is a white European, the idea of being deported for any reason is less likely than for people of different skin tones and from different places than Europe (and I'm not talking about Canada!).

Actually, I wanted to talk about age and superficiality and faces and facelifts and all that. A friend of mine today told me that I used to be one of her "young friends." Now that I'm "older," that is, can't pass for being twenty-five, I'm no longer "young." My friend just turned 60 a couple of months ago. I wonder how I would feel were I 60 right this moment. Would I feel even further away from 25? Probably. Would I need to get a facelift to become a 25-year-old? Probably. I have friends who are in their fifties who have had lifts. (I'm not fifty, and who cares, anyway).