Homing In

I have a particular look. I've got all this curly blonde hair, I've got this mustache, and these lines on my face. I'm skinny as a rail, and while I smile when it's called for, it seems to me that I glower by default. These are all self-assessments, of course. I'm glad to have a distinctive appearance, as I consider it a real plus professionally. I'm eager for any clues as to just how it may be defined and what may heighten it.

The other day, I was doing a scene for my roommate's short film, as I believe I've said. I was wearing the undershirt I wrote of previously, along with some jeans. I had a face-full of real uglifying makeup. It all make for quite a picture, and it elicited smiles and compliments from everyone who saw it. Nobody thought that I looked handsome of course, but the total effect was a look that really worked for me.

Lookalike

The other night, I went to the movies with a friend. This theater was one of those cheap theaters, but because tickets are generally three dollars and never less than a dollar fifty, it cannot be characterized as a dollar theater. It's cheap, and it's rundown, but it serves well as a repository of movies that are no longer especially lucrative but have a way to go before they reach video. I had a good time at the movie, but imagine that an encounter I had will prove to be more interesting in the long run than the alien invasion movie we saw.

I went inside and bought a hotdog for a dollar, but no drinks, because everything else there is as expensive as it would be at a regular theater. I was standing there with the hotdog looking for where to buy a ticket when a middle-aged lady, apparently of Latino (if that's the proper thing to say) descent, approached me. She said that I looked familiar, and I replied that I do live nearby. She said that wasn't it, and that I looked like someone she knew but couldn't identify.

The Poseable

I put up a picture of myself in those sunglasses I described the other day, and people started manipulating in the style of a Chuck Norris film poster I likened my look to. In the poster, the lenses of his sunglasses reflect still shots of an action sequence. One person put those same shots over my lenses, and another pasted in images of monsters. It was an odd but flattering thing, and I thought about how people seem to like doing things to my look.

People are always talking about how I should pick my hair way out, or straighten it to see how long it would be. I bristle at this a bit, figuring that they might get their own hair to do this with, but it also is at least somewhat flattering. It's a little like being a doll, maybe. You dress it, you pose it, and you cut its hair, thus ruining it and eliciting screams from the sibling to whom it belongs. I guess that last thing doesn't really apply to me.