Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.
People can be beautiful until they open their mouths or start doing stuff. Take the red-headed daughter of the new football coach at my high school. She had a beautiful voice to go with killer good looks. Then I realized that while she had a gorgeous smile plastered on her face nobody was home in her eyes; or, if she were home, she was too busy looking in the mirror to hear someone knocking at the door. I detected a shrill in her voice which was notched abnormally high. By the end of the year she looked like an overdone crone who sang like Ethel Merman.
In the desperate years—you know, after graduation and before you get married—I dated a girl who had been Miss Gate City. Gate City, Virginia, was a suburb of Kingsport, Tennessee. We were sitting in Shoney’s Big Boy having a bite to eat when the Tennessee governor’s race came up in the conversation. Miss Gate City, who couldn’t vote in the election because she lived in Virginia and not Tennessee, said she was for the Republican. Just that moment Winfield Dunn and his entourage walked in.
“Well, there’s your candidate,” I said to her.
“What for?” she asked.
“Governor. That’s Winfield Dunn.”
“Oh. Is that what he looks like?”
The next beautiful girl I dated invited me to her apartment. I noticed a copy of Love Story on the table.
“So what did you think of the book?”
“I got through the first couple of chapters then it fell open to the last page and I saw that the girl dies and that ruined it for me.”
The opening line of the novel is, “What do you say about a girl who dies at age 25? She loved Beethoven, the Beatles and me.”
Of course the girl dies at the end of the book. My date went from bewitching brunette to Dumbo in ten seconds.
Not to leave guys out, let me mention Orlando Bloom, the prettiest man in the movies. When he played an elf in the Lord of the Rings he made Cate Blanchette look like a dog. One day he was walking down a Manhattan street, and my daughter nudged him as she was bustling to get to work on time. He swirled and glared at her imperiously.
“Don’t you know who I am?”
Even though she was raised by a nice polite Southern couple in Florida, my daughter had adapted to the manners of New York very quickly. Her salty reply was, in essence, I don’t care who you are.
“I’m Orlando Bloom!”
Again my daughter replied in the New York vernacular that she still didn’t care. To which he launched into his own brand of invective that went something like, “What kind of subhuman are you that you don’t care that I’m Orlando Bloom?”
As I said, beauty is relative. You can have all the best physical attributes in the world, but if you’re stupid or vain, you look like the relative of a dog.