Glasses, Braces, Bodies
Those *other* disabilities, and the hot girls who have them
When I was 12 I got my eyes tested, and the doctors discovered that there was a marked discrepancy between them, one that they said they had never seen. My right eye is almost blind, but my left eye is so naturally sharp in its vision that it had been compensating for the other side all my life, and I hadn’t known I’d needed glasses until then.
We went down a floor to look at the glasses that this medical place had on offer, and I said I wanted a pair of cats’ eye glasses, because that’s what the gorgeous waitresses who worked at my parents’ coffeehouse in the early-90’s wore. The woman at the shop looked at me askance and said, “honey that was back from when I was your age and nobody wanted to wear them. You’ll never find a pair of cats’ eye glasses.”
Teenage me was, like me now, incredibly stubborn, and I knew she was wrong, because I still haven’t forgotten the glamorous and impossibly enticing faces that made EJ’s not just the first but the best in Albuquerque, back when coffeehouses in the US were few.
Entry-within-an-entry:
For those who don’t know, my parents opened New Mexico’s first coffeehouse in 1985, when I was two. They’d met in college in Santa Fe — my dad from New Orleans, my mom from the empty wilds of rural Midwestern cornfields — and had briefly considered New Orleans, but my birthplace was already brimming with mini-paradise coffeehouses, and in New Mexico, they’d be the first. My dad, as a musician, was also determined to open a listening venue that would support traveling musicians who came through Albuquerque. Decades later, I met the folk musician Dar Williams who told me that places like EJ’s (“1992 and 1994!” she’d told me without missing a beat when I asked if she’d ever played there) were what kept her going in the difficult early days of making it as a female folksinger and guitarist.
By the time I was 14, well, speaking of folk singers, Lisa Loeb had very much happened:
Thus began a new era of chicks with glasses getting “alternative”-cool, and now, a year or two after I’d been deemed someone who needed glasses, I would get them. I refused braces, because I was not going to be a girl with glasses and crutches and braces, on principle. (Whether or not you believe I made the right choice depends on your view of slight overbites. Some people have strong views, one way or the other, and I’ve had dentists treat me like my mouth’s very existence represents injustice and/or crime.)
Nadia, a girl in my 8th grade Louisiana History class who was one of 3 to get kicked out of school for enviable sexual escapades on campus grounds, asked me, “Are those prescription?” and I had never felt so glamorous as I did the moment it was implied to me that these glasses were cool and/or hot enough that I’d wear them for the thrill of it rather than a medical need. (Decades later, as an undergrad, I would take erotic photos of my hottest friend to send to her then-boyfriend-now-husband in Australia, and while most of the photos were somewhat serious art drawing attention to her staggering nude figure and faerie-long deep-green hair, two or three of them made use of a pair of cheap non-prescription glasses from Claire’s that rendered her a naughty schoolgirl; she used a textbook and everything. From that venture I kind of got the fake-glasses thing? Sort of? Not really? But on an only-tangentially-related note I’ll say that culturally we lost something deep in our souls when the practice of taking erotic photos became something you’re expected to do alone.)
I will tell you one thing, if, when I was 12 or 13, at the peak of my sky-breaking No Doubt fandom, you had shown me this:
I’d have lost my damn mind. The truth is, unsurprisingly I’m sure if you’ve been paying attention, I look at this photo and still lose my mind. It’s GWEN STEFANI IN GLASSES. Does she actually need them? WHO KNOWS? WHO CARES?! Gwen Stefani is wearing glasses. Had she done this back when Tragic Kingdom had first disrupted my existence for the entire rest of it, I’d have picked the first pair I could find off any of those shelves the moment I’d been told I needed them. But I feel it all worked out for the best.
Of course, I can’t talk Gwen in glasses without alluding to her braces days, even though it seems from recent interviews that she would rather I didn’t:
Had the time “line” allowed and I’d had this photo for reference, it’s possible I would’ve agreed with my dentist: the fact that one can slip a fraction of a fingertip between my top and bottom teeth when I close my mouth is an offense indeed, and it should be rectified immediately. Unfortunately for my dentist, my best friend in high school’s reaction to my 16-year-old self-consciousness about my overbite was to immediately let me know that in Tom Robbins’ Still Life with Woodpecker, the narrator rhapsodized to the skies about red hair AND overbites on women. That became my favorite book for a while there, and, while I’m hesitant to heap too much praise on Tom Robbins today, I owe him some thanks for several ways that that book made my life easier.
Anyway, glasses, braces, bodies. Get what you need: let’s end it right there.