BACK IN LA 5 - BEAUTY

Beauty and I are hanging out at Starbucks during her break. When I go to the restroom everyone stares at me. At first I think I must be looking extra fabulous, but when I look in the mirror I remember that the skin around my eyebrows is super red and unnaturally shiny. My eyebrows themselves are perfectly shaped, but much darker than usual.

At this moment I am truly an L.A. lady. Maybe not as a scary as the women you see in the grocery store, in unflattering flourescent lighting, that have just had botox injected, chemical peels, or too much plastic surgery. Blank, stepford wife expressions on their faces, skin stretched too smooth and made translucent. Women who can afford the treatments but not the time to recuperate in private. Or women that couldn't afford good treatments, and now have to live with the results.

I have really sensitive skin, and Beauty is the only person I trust to wax my eyebrows. As red as the skin gets, it will fade in a few hours. And my eyebrows look perfect. I've had aestheticians leave blisters and redness that didn't fade for days, and without happy results. My eyebrows are difficult to shape properly. Especially this time. I haven't seen Beauty for over a year, and I've been tweezing them myself.

"You took too much off the right one," she told me before handing me the mirror. "You need to lay off with the tweezers for awhile and you will have to fill it in with a pencil. I can't fix it."

This is a much bigger travesty to Beauty than it is to me. She is thorough and very careful. She abandoned the idea of doing body waxing because, as she put it, "who wants me down in their bikini area, plucking every stray hair and trying to get the shape exactly right?" Even Brazilians were out of the question for her. She is just too meticulous.

In the bathroom at Starbucks I ponder the effect of the dark tint and dramatic shape of my eyebrows. They transform my face. There is a "rule" that heavy eye make-up signals "look at me." Heavy lip make-up signals "listen to what I am saying." If you really look at advertisements you will see that rarely are eyes and lips both accented. If blush on the cheeks is the only obvious make-up the signal is "innocence" or "freshness."

Made-up eyebrows, though, are about expression. The expressiveness of the face is accented. Ironically, this fits the image I have of Beauty. She expresses herself visually in every way. Her home was always a stunning arrangement of colour and style. As painted and adorned as the high profile women that comprise most of her clientele. Beauty herself always dresses stylishly and with a lot of colour. And she does everything with panache.

Even as a child, she has told me, she constantly rearranged her room and re-painted it often. She was always playing dress up, and I know from experience that having her do my make-up before we go out is a guarantee that I will look like a superstar. She also paints on canvas, does numerous crafts and hobbies (most of her Christmas gifts are homemade: candles, gourmet food items, knitted hats and scarfs, dream pillows, etc.) and is a fantastic cook.

Beauty is one example of why people in this town fear another strike. During the writer's strike many of Beauty's clientele cut back on services like waxing. While her celebrity clientele continued to make regular appointments, her bread and butter, women who work in the industry "below the line", dropped off to the point that Beauty had to make drastic changes to her life.

Beauty has throughout the six years that I have known her, worked both in Los Angeles and up north in her hometown. Once a month she would drive up north and to take care of her clients there. During the writer's strike, after trying to find a job in a salon down here, she applied at a spa in her hometown and got the job. She sold her condo and moved back. Part of the decision was that she'd felt a pull to be with her family and friends again. She now commutes to L.A. once a month to attend to her clients here.

"I wish they would all move here," she tells me over coffee. "I love L.A., but I miss my family and friends so much. Especially when they keep moving away," she adds, giving me a dark look. "You are back for good aren't you? It's going to suck if I move here and you disappear again."

Beauty has fallen madly in love with a man she met here shortly before she moved. Now she is really torn. She wants to move back, but feels uncertain about doing it just "for love." Even if he is "the one"- and it seems likely that he is- she wants to be sure that any decision she makes will satisfy her whether the relationship succeeds or fails.

We talk about owning our decisions completely. If you take full responsibility for a decision, it can never come back to haunt you, even if it doesn't work out.

Her break is over and we say good-bye. I won't see her again for another month.

"I missed you," I say as we hug. "Thank you for making me beautiful again."

She laughs and gets in her car. I walk to the bus stop, startling passer-bys with my red clown eyebrows. By the time I get home the redness is gone. I raise my eyebrows as high as they will go and do my best Norma Desmond.

"Alright, Mr. Demille, I am ready for my close-up."

TOODLE ON!!!