You remember her – like yesterday, you remember her.
All about the nose. She was convinced it was the biggest thing on her body.
She was convinced you were just being nice. She was convinced half the population of Culver City could live inside her nostrils.
She knew, once she turned 18 her nose would be so big it would weigh her head down.
For the rest of her life, staring at the floor. She would need a neck-brace just to say hi.
But the real reason – the matter-of-fact/hope-to-die reason was Dr. Klein.
Dr. Klein was the local Plastic Surgeon. He had a reputation – he was the go-to doctor if you wanted a nose just like Tuesday Weld’s. He had a five month waiting list.
Every girl in her class went to see Dr. Klein. You could tell. It was an epidemic of tiny noses where once were formidable honkers.
Girls with nose bandages the size of small children would show up in class – every few weeks another one would get her nose fixed. Same bandages – same black eyes – all looking like they lost fights. All in pain – all smiling.
It became a competition – who would be the last one to see Dr. Klein before they left 11th grade.
And of course Alex hounded her parents mercilessly until they caved and got her a birthday present. All expense paid trip to Dr. Klein’s office – count backwards from 100 and become drop-dead gorgeous in between. That was the plan – that was the procedure.
You didn’t see anything wrong with her nose – it was cute – it was her. Maybe there was the bump, but still – it was part of who she was. It was 90% of why you were boyfriend and girlfriend. Six months was a record. You and Alex were in it for the long haul, at least for eleventh grade, and her nose wasn’t a deal breaker.
You wondered who would appear once the anesthesia wore off.
Alex joined the league of bandaged noses and black eyes.
After two weeks of looking like a car accident on Pico the bandages finally came off.
What emerged was a very small nose – one that looked like it wouldn’t withstand a common cold.
The thing about Dr. Klein – he was good at what he did, but he made every nose look the same – he had one size and one shape and that was it. And you could tell which girls in school went under his scalpel. The end result was “kind of like” Tuesday Weld, but Tuesday Weld looked like Tuesday Weld and nobody else – that was her face and everything was in proportion. But with Tuesday Weld’s nose on Alex’s face, she looked more like a Laboratory Mouse than an actual sixteen year old girl.
But tell Alex that – her transformation worked wonders – she got a new personality and emerged as Miss Teen America. It was like the girls in tenth grade who discovered Kleenex stuffed in bras made boys hormones run amok.
And this newfound nose became a newfound personality, and along with it came newfound attention, especially from the 12th grade boys who were in fierce competition with each other to get Alex to go out with them.
At first she resisted, telling the drooling lothario wannabes that she was already taken.
You felt pretty certain Alex would be loyal – you felt a rosy glow coming from your head just at the thought.
Well . . .until the day you were walking down the hallway to your Science class and spotted Alex with a member of the baseball team, actively smashing lips in an empty classroom.
So much for loyalty – so much for love being forever. Who wrote those songs – what were they thinking?
Just stunned – just speechless – just looking at your heart disintegrating into shards of excuses. Feeling instant rotten.
No explanations, no “oops, sorry – my mistake”. No tear-soaked confessions. Just a quick turn and a quick exit. And you, all wrapped up in too shocked to do anything.
Just done and over and on with life.
You were warned – you were told love wasn’t what you thought it was going to be. Not like TV – not like pretend. Real life came with warts and sadness and it happens all the time.
You thought about that as the bus lumbered towards home. The guy sitting next to you has his transistor radio out and KHJ is just loud enough to make you get lost.
Lost worked for you. . .a lot.
And to help getting lost, here’s almost an hour’s worth of Frank Terry at KHJ from September 1966.
