Dingdingding! Partner and I have a new favorite TV show. We used to like “Nip/Tuck,” with the hot / sultry Julian McMahon and the innocent-looking / buff / perverse Dylan Walsh as playful plastic surgeons. (My favorite episode, bar none, was the one with the guy who liked to have sex with furniture. This was first signaled when he leaned down, eyes closed, and licked the surface of his oak desk. Later we saw him get naked with (and on) a sofa, and even an operating table.
Logo has shown all 100 episodes of “Nip/Tuck,” and it is done, and we are in the doldrums.
But wait! Also on Logo: “Pretty Hurts”!
Basically it’s “Nip/Tuck” as a reality show. The featured star, Rand Rusher, is a Beverly Hills registered nurse who specializes in “injectables.” Primary among these are “freezers” (it ain’t hip to call it Botox anymore, apparently) and “fillers” (collagen-like substances that can be squooshed in to fill any gaps, potholes, or fissures you might have in your face).
Rand is adorable, like a golden retriever. He’s big and blond and muscular, but you sense that if he stops working out for maybe ten minutes, he will be a big fat blond boy with a trembling upper lip. He is earnest and sweet and sincere (he says “Ouch!” before he pops the needle into your lip or forehead or eyelid), and talkative, and sort of vulnerable. His bitchy ex-boyfriend is also his business manager, and they still live together, and it's very complicated.
Partner and I, needless to say, are mesmerized by all this.
One episode featured the grotesque model Janice Dickinson, who has an angular body that looks as if it were twisted together out of coat hangers, and a face like a pickaxe. I would be willing to wager that she eats children. She did everything in Rand's office but drink the Botox straight out of the bottle. Also, irritatingly / grotesquely, she made a sort of singing yodel when she was getting her shots. Believe me, when you look like Janice Dickinson, you don’t want to say or do anything that makes you seem less human.
Then there was a kid in his early twenties who came in for some kind of reconstructive thing, but also shyly asked Rand if he thought he should do anything about his “wrinkles.” (Seriously, this kid looked like he’d just left the sixth grade, so any “wrinkles” he had were probably sleep marks from his Toy Story pillowcase.) “You don’t need that,” Rand said. “You’re young.”
The boy smiled dewily and whispered: “Thank you.”
As if it were a compliment!
Back in my day, before lasers and transistor radios and frozen foods, if someone said “You’re young,” it was usually meant as a slight, or an excuse. It translated as “You have no experience with life and can’t be expected to know better,” or sometimes (as when my sister Susan used to say it to me) “You’re a pesky shrimp and I wish you would jump off a cliff and leave me in peace.”
Now, apparently, it’s equivalent to “You are radiantly lovely,” or “Looking at you makes me want to dance and sing.”
Forgive me for being cranky. My injectables haven’t taken effect yet.
And I'm not talking about freezers or fillers.
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