“Hey Alex, could you come here for a sec?”
The director gently calls me over. I smile, hop up and hustle his way, having mastered the Women’s National Anthem: “Of course! Anything! Right away!” I was always a pleasure to have in class, and now the Music Industry is my classroom, the Man In Charge my teacher.
He ushers me into a back room, away from the rest of the crew, where I am greeted by a super close-up, duper high-def shot of my lip-glossed mouth smirking at me from a monitor. It shines all too vividly in the low-lit space of warehouse gray.
“So, uh…” He gestures to the screen. “Do you see that?” Immediately I do. My stomach feels hollow and knotted. If my olive skin wasn’t caked in foundation, I’d be blushing pink as this shot of my perfectly pageant-ready lips.
The evidence of my failed attempt makes me hot with shame.
“Oh. Um. Woah, yep.” I say with a laugh, folding my arms across my stomach. Of course I see them. Tiny little micro hairs decorating my upper lip in the subtle shade of very black. What I refer to fondly as my Mexicanjewstache. Dammit. I used my Finishing Touch Flawless Hair Remover this morning, but clearly it was no match for the closeup. The evidence of my failed attempt makes me hot with shame.
The director, a man in his 30s or 40s, seems (to put it nicely) out of his comfort zone. “Yeah! It’s not really, uh, something we can fix.” Poor guy. I haven’t seen a grown man this nervous since my dad, pacing in front of my Barbie-brimming bed, gave me the sex talk. I wonder if this director guy has kids.
“We really need this shot,” he sputters. “Do you have anything to, um, ya know… take care of it?”
“I’m sure I could find something!” I say with my trademark optimism. “Worst case scenario, I think I have tweezers in my bag?”
I was one hundred percent certain of it, actually. I’ve lived in this body my whole life. I know how to prepare! More often than I’d like to admit, I imagine what I’d want if I was stranded on a desert island Castaway style, and a pang of panic rips through me as I think about my stubborn little face hairs. I imagine them growing wildly out of control like bindweed in a neglected garden. Tweezers. Don’t forget my tweezers.
Making sure no one notices certain things about our faces is an essential part of having a face for the women who raised me.
I am suddenly regretting not following my Hispanic mom’s beauty regimen she attempted to instill in me as a downy pubescent: “Here, Alexandra, I want to teach you something I do to take care of that peach fuzz!” (I have never seen black peach fuzz, but what do I know?) I sat on the edge of my mom’s porcelain tub in her bathroom while she smeared a grainy white cream on my upper lip. Bleach. We waited together while it worked its magic. It overwhelmed my sense of smell and tingled (burned?) my face (“That means it’s working!”). Ten minutes later, we washed it off. “There! Now you won’t notice it. No one can see it now,” my mom says plainly. And that was that. It became routine grooming, bleaching our lady-staches together. Making sure no one notices certain things about our faces is an essential part of having a face for the women who raised me. Nose jobs run in my family. I inherited that one too. We are women, after all, and if there’s even a fraction of a chance someone in the world might be discomfited by our nose shape, the rational thing to do is pay someone thousands of dollars to break it and give you a new one.
“Ok, great!” the director says, pulling me back to the present. “We just want to make sure you’ll feel good about this shot!” His tone is a neat mixture of sympathy and relief that his work here is done. Mine, on the other hand, is just beginning. I spend the next forty-five minutes plucking my upper lip, removing my microstache one tiny dark hair at a time. By the time I’m done, the area is red and numb. The hairs are gone, though, and I finally have the All American White Girl mouth of my dreams. That pesky constellation of dark hair I inherited from my ancestors is gone, and YouTube watchers from around the globe will be able to enjoy a cover of Meghan Trainor’s “Lips Are Movin” sans stache.
I walk out ready to perform my way through the rest of the day. Director Man wants a reshoot of the close up of my mouth. The makeup artist hurries over to touch up the redness on my face. She’s kind, and we give each other a knowing look, empathizing over our shared womanness. The song playback starts: “If your lips are moving, if your lips are moving, if your lips are moving then you’re lying, lying, lying, baby.”
“That was good! How do you feel?” The director asks.
“Great!” I respond with a hairless smile.
“Alright, let’s move to the next shot.”
The day goes by this way. At 11:30 p.m. I am doing a quick change into my eighth outfit of the day, about to film another version of the exact same shot of me dancing awkwardly (but-in-a-cute-and-very-feminine-way). I am miserable. I have chills and a suspected fever, my body’s favorite way of telling me to stop, stop, please, for the love of god, stop.
Standing up for myself really goes against the whole pleasure-to-have-in-class energy…
Torri, my best friend who has been working with me as a day-to-day manager, is really bothered by the injustice of them keeping me past my call time. We’ve been here for more than fourteen hours. This is so disrespectful, she texts me from across the couch we’re both sitting on, You are sick. You need to say something or I will.
No! Please don’t say anything! It’s fine. Standing up for myself really goes against the whole pleasure-to-have-in-class energy I’ve been channeling since 9:00 this morning.
Ignoring me, she gets up to talk to the director. She tells him they have one more shot with me because they have kept me much later than is contracted, and I have worked so hard I have a fever. It’s painful to think the Man In Charge might be inconvenienced by me, but I know Torri is right and my spirit is thanking her deeply. I step into a tiny pair of ripped jean shorts, throw on a blazer and a black hat I see all the cool girls at my church wear, and prepare myself for one more Song and Dance.
“Just three minutes, Alex,” I say to myself. “You can do this for three more minutes.” And so I do.
When the video comes out, Meghan Trainor tweets it and says, “YAS!” People generally love it, and the video gets over a million views. The comment section is wallpapered with praise like, “I prefer her over other singers who only care about looking pretty in front of the camera. She is beautiful in a natural and fun way.”
Must have been a good pair of tweezers.
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