On makeup

Race photos are I think almost universally unflattering, certainly there is not a single one from the half-marathon last weekend that I am actually going to pay money to get a copy of (maybe next time!), but just in case you're curious (I love seeing pictures of people I only know from their blogs, so I hope this will be excused!): this I think is the most flattering one (except that I look like I am standing still and just waving my arms around! hmmm... not sure what's up with that...); this one is from a slightly odd angle but at least I look like I'm running quite fast...

(I had a good author photo taken in June, but I am going to wait to unveil it till I've got the real author website thing going sometime this fall--the last one I had was quite nice only ever after when I had to e-mail it to someone I reproached myself for having economized--I was in a very broke stage of life when I had it taken--by not having the makeup also, you look at these photographs in large scale on your computer screen and every pore is visible, it's awful! Then you end up sending neurotic explanatory e-mails to whoever's getting the picture--it occurred to me after the last round of this, with my agent's assistant sometime this spring, that it would make an extremely funny premise for a little comic gift-book-type thing, like what you buy at a cash register--authors try and explain away their author photos--or hold on to more attractive but increasingly obsolete ones from ten years earlier--I feel certain that I am far from alone in feeling the need to accompany the picture with a sort of complicated explanation, though it is true I am more-than-averagely prone to writing excessively talkative and slightly demented stream-of-consciousness e-mails! This time I went all out and had the makeup done professionally by the person the photographer works with, which sort of filled me with horror--I had to scrub down immediately afterwards, I am not a stranger to lipstick and eyeliner and/or shadow but the last time I had makeup, like, all over my skin like that was when I used to do a lot of acting in college!--but the point of it is that when you look at the pictures it makes you look like a slightly improved version of your regular self... My brother M. came up to New York once a couple years ago for a sort of hybrid job interview/audition for that show Trading Spaces, the usual building-stuff-for-movies-and-TV work had been a bit slow and they'd put out a call for carpenters to audition--of course I am slightly biased, but I think any objective observer would also agree that M. is an unusually nice-looking and articulate fellow as well as an extremely talented and imaginative carpenter, he was a good candidate for this [he is going to be annoyed I have written about this on my blog! Sorry...]--I had just left keys downstairs for him, I had something else to do, and when I got home he very sheepishly apologized for getting makeup all over a towel in the bathroom, he had completely underrated the audition aspect of the thing because of course they plastered makeup all over him before doing a camera-test type thing, he was absolutely horrified! I was heartlessly amused--I think that on temperamental grounds, there are few jobs he would have hated more, it was fine that he didn't get it...)