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- Read Cathy's local affairs column every Saturday in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (see link below).
- Her national affairs column appears every Tuesday exclusively at cathysorbo.com.
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| Vanity Unfair. |
| Posted: Tuesday, March 20, 2007 |
March has been a busy month for me.
It is my birthday month and I like to celebrate sporadically throughout the entire span of its 31 days, if possible. This year the actual birthday falls on a Thursday, which happens to be a perfect night for hogging a karaoke stage. I have karaoke on the brain, and am mentally assembling my list of songs to sing. I share my birthday with William Shatner and hope to one day tear open a Klingon piñata with him while karaoking "To Sir With Love."
The month of March is host to my wedding anniversary, which this year was spent in San Francisco, sans husband and child. My husband and I met in San Francisco so it was especially nice to be there. I was able to see my core of dear friends, and on top of it all, it was a fabulous two-day working vacation.
The best thing about March is that it welcomes the start of the Formula One racing season. This year Finland's Kimi Räikkönen is driving for the illustrious Ferrari team, and easily beat the other drivers to secure a 1st place win right off the bat.
The extra perk that arrives with the F1 season is the triumphant return of cable TV to our home. Today I had a precious moment to sit down with a hot lunch and do a bit of cable watching. I clicked forward from Speed TV to MTV, then after a few minutes a couple more clicks to The Learning Channel (TLC). A show called "10 Years Younger" was on and I experienced a giddy rush of excitement that I haven't felt for 5 cable-free months. I remember that cable TV is a mecca for make-over shows, and I am a complete sucker for them. I even get weepy sometimes with the magical transformations that take place.
The premise of "10 Years Younger" is simple if not somewhat brutal: you stand in a soundproofed Plexiglas case on a busy city street while 100 strangers inspect you and take a guess at your age. Ouch. A median age is factored from the responses and the Glam Team works together to create a non-surgical makeover for you. Then you get back in the case, and another 100 people are asked to guess your age and the median age should clock in at 10 years younger than the first guessed age.
It's fun, but I wonder about the women (and men) who are caught in the hard-core elective cosmetic surgery rut. Sure, give a little bit of Botox a try, and once those frown lines begin to fade, there will be no way you are going to say no to future treatments. A little collagen here, a chemical face-peel there. And wouldn't just a little more added boobage be nice?
These procedures aren't exactly cheap, and there's been lots of legislation in several states to implement a so-called vanity tax to these procedures with New Jersey already enjoying such a tax.
A couple of years ago a senator from my state was lobbying for a vanity tax for elective cosmetic surgery, with the idea that the accrued revenue would go into health care for underprivileged children so that we would be able to feel guilty about not getting cosmetic surgery.
I?m secretly glad that her legislation never passed. I feared looking deep into a mirror only to see fine lines of little kids that needed vaccines, dental X-rays and antibiotics.
They would be there, I can assure you. There they are now, all around my eyes. Oh, and there are a couple of really needy children disguised as frown lines between my eyebrows.
If vanity taxes are being looked at again, let?s consider a tax on gluttony, sloth and greed while we're at it and create some real revenue.
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