Hello, Gorgeous

One night I went out with an old girlfriend to two local bars. At the first, we were among the youngest and prettiest women there. The mean age of the clientele was roughly fifty-one and we felt dewy and svelte by comparison. We languished there, sipping our beers and reveling in our prettiness pecking order, which we re-ascertained every so often as a gust of frigid night air ushered in a new gaggle of women. This may sound mean spirited, this sizing up, but we meant it less in a catty, mean-girl way and more as an ethnological study in Bar Trends of the Average North American Single Person. It was an underfunded study.

What really struck me, after a while, as this pageant of ordinary and some would say homely women poured in through the door, was how beautiful they all were. Mostly to themselves, for better and for worse. But I started to sort of fall in love with each and every one of them.

Now by most accounts, this crop, including us mind you, would not have won any awards-- would not have even been allowed to fill out the forms. These bodies were beyond pear-shape with booties and bosoms resembling all manner of cones and cups and bells and boards. From the very ample to the exceedingly wanting, these bodies defied convention in a variety of combinations rarely found in the media—actually more indigenous to factory town malls and the boardwalks of New Jersey. There were bad dye jobs and brittle blowouts, relentless wrists and unforgiving chins. There were too many hair cuts from the eighties and far too little clothing for their ages, but every one of these women looked beautiful to me and I finally figured out why.

And it wasn't because I was tipsy on my half a warm beer.

These women were beautiful because they felt beautiful. Having come straight from the triumph of Getting Ready For Saturday Night, every last one of them was beaming, emerging victorious from their quest.

They all took care to choose the right outfit, some spending fourfold the time and energy of the others, but all of them looking to accentuate the positive and play down what that lady in the dressing room at Macy's had referred to as her "challenge areas." They would hang up the clothing rejected on the bed when they got home later, they told themselves. They would touch up their roots next week. This was good enough for now. This would do for tonight.

Then they leaned in closer.

Some liked what they saw in the mirror more than others but they all pressed on. They futzed and tussled, smudged and scrunched, using a combination of what they'd learned over the years from magazines and big sisters, infomercials and best friends. Some still tried to recreate what that professional make-up artist had done at their cousin's wedding all those years ago, but most had it down pat. Then they all smiled, checked their teeth, said, "Not bad," and moved on.

Good taste did not come naturally to these women. In fact, it hid around the corner. Somewhere along the line, a woman grabbed a gold anklet that an old boyfriend had given her and another grabbed a sweater handed down from a sister too lazy to hand wash. Most of them remembered to tuck in an errant bra strap and forgot that their thongs were showing. And they all chose the dangily earrings that their best friends assured them, "Aren’t too young," even though, in the back of their minds, they knew they were too old.

Every choice was carefully arrived at because it made them feel beautiful, whether via the new voice in their head, recently replacing another after a milestone birthday, or a compliment paid twenty years ago still resonating in their mind. Each layer reminded them of ordinary events or traces of people that had brushed up against their egos, leaving them with just enough confidence to keep the momentum going. Then they threw on a coat, hit the lights and headed out the door.

And hopefully, if they were just a little bit smart, they didn't give it another thought for the rest of Saturday night.

As the bar swelled, I imagined other bars in Morris County, Vermont, Madrid, and Dubai. And as the dressing hour draped itself around the globe, I envisioned an enormous wave of self-esteem brimming in Ecuadorian women parting their hair to be braided, Tokyo teenagers buckling themselves into 4" wedgies, and Masai women adjusting collars of beaded rings. With the exception of Amish women and nuns, there were billions of women all getting ready for a night on the town, or the prairie or the tundra as it may be. Legions and legions of women all looking in mirrors or hubcaps or darkened clean windows on this Saturday night and at that critical moment, in an instant of radical acceptance, saying to themselves, "This is as good as I get," and then, "Let's go have me some fun." All of them arriving at the same notion of self-good-enoughness. Or else they never would have left the house.

And so we toasted to them, my friend and I, toasted, "To leaving the house!"

We finished our beers and slipped off our stools and as I snaked through the place towards the door, I mouthed the words, "You're all beautiful and I love you."

Then we went to the other bar.

The Other Bar was in another town, a fancier town. In the Other Bar, we were among the oldest broads, the mean age being closer to thirty. These women had also taken part in tonight's beauty ritual but with far greater results. We ordered a drink and stood off to the side and marveled at their radiant skin. Their round bottoms and perky boobs nearly saluted us. Their taught bodies and toned arms practically reverberated with gym-vim. They had expensive clothes and hair and shoes and wore it all so well. Taste had either been bred into them or arrived at via checkbook, but it all came together breezily and they all looked thoroughly divine.

My girlfriend and I sipped our cocktails in relative obscurity and quietly thanked the gazelles at this watering hole for giving us something shiny to look at. For adorning the room with glamour, dripping with desire, lousy with lust. They replied by giving us the occasional dirty look, which we took to be a local custom of welcoming and warmth.

I decided to love these women, too.

Yes, mine was an equal opportunity love, and I wasn't about to hate anyone because she's beautiful. Sure, this crowd probably arrived at their Good Enough Moment long before the last crew, but you never know, you never know. My "challenge area," gone undetected by the woman at Target, was that I had to try hard to love everyone for her efforts, applaud everyone for trying. So I made a concerted effort to find the inner beauty in even the most outstandingly spectacular long-legged, white-teethed, high cheek-boned, buxom natural blond in the room, regardless of her obvious personality flaws. It wasn't easy, but I did it. And I'm sure she's forever indebted to me. No doubt she would have thanked me as I was leaving. If she'd thought of it. Or even seen me. Or knew I was alive.

My girlfriend and I left and said our goodbyes. It had been a good night and we were tired. Happy tired, sated tired. We'd had our fill of beauty, inner, outer and under. And as I took my mascara off in the same mirror that had sent me off with a slap on the ass all those hours ago, I gazed at what would greet me on Sunday morning. Goodnight moon, goodnight body, goodnight face. Thanks for another Saturday night. Gotta love Saturday night.