# 65 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

Last night I watched an interview on 'Larry King Live' with Tracey Lindsay Melchior. Since then, I have to admit, I have been in a nasty mood. The topic of discussion was Tracey’s new book, “Breaking the Perfect Ten”. A kind of autobiography about a disheartening life wrought with hardships. Difficulties of greater rank and importance than one can ever hope to realize.

Now I am too empathetic a person to wind myself around everyone’s troubles because it ends up being too much. There has to be a certain level of discrimination over what is worthwhile grieving for and what is not. Anyway, for some reason I was skeptical about this person’s difficulties right from the get go. And even more skeptical when early in the interview she stated that her troubled life had stemmed from her exceptional looks. More than once she stated how her beauty had been such a terrible bother. She even made a point (with a laugh) how young boys ditched their steady girlfriends when she appeared on the scene.

She obviously wanted to impress on Larry and his audience one thing above all else – how beautiful she is. When she spoke of her physical beauty, and she did so without embarrassment or reluctance, it was with such conviction. But it was with less conviction, with some obvious insecurity, that she sought for an appropriate response to why she wrote the book. Eventually she derived from some simple cortex in her mind a scripted line to deal with the problem. Tracey wrote the book because she is now a born again Christian and she wanted to write this book to encourage others. To be a witness.

It was all too much for me. It probably wouldn’t have been if there hadn’t been so much of that God-factor involved. How can anyone empowered with so much concern and God-given grace towards others go on television and whine about a terrible life that stemmed most prominently from her (self-defined) incredible beauty? That’s like saying that everyone else is too plain, too not-beautiful to understand her life.

There’s an extreme vanity here that is far too puffed up. And there is an obscene lack of understanding as well. A lack of understanding that in this old world there are plenty of people living with the curse of marred faces – scarring or disfigurement from wounds, birth defects, or disease who would be deeply offended by this nonsense. And the rest of us, Plain Janes’ like me, found no encouragement in this discussion either. It is hard to swallow the nonsense that for those scarred and disfigured and for those Plain Janes’ like me, there is nothing for us to whine about – we are blessed and so incredibly lucky. After all, look how dreadful life could be if we were beautiful or looked like her, assuming that the two are one and the same. In addition, I don't think anyone appreciates being congratulated on having an ugly house, an ugly dress, an ugly car, or an ugly face. And in an oblique way, that is what her comments suggested.

Tracy pretends that life would have been so much better, the events so much sweeter, if she hadn’t been ‘cursed’ with such beauty of face. Give me a break. If it was such a curse why didn’t she pour battery acid on her face to simmer it down?

What seems to make more sense to me is that the root of Tracy’s problems may have been her own vanity and in acknowledging that, she probably could have written a better book. (though, admittedly I haven’t read the book and after watching that interview, I don’t intend to).

You know me. I’m not generally this negative. But maybe its just that right now, amidst the horrors of individuals ravaged by earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes, it is too difficult for me to switch to a similar ranking of the horrors of an existence ravaged by beauty.