SHE WALKS, SHE TALKS, SHE WIGGLES ON HER BELLY LIKE A REPTILE!

I was watching a "makeover" show on TV yesterday, about a poor 40-year-old woman who submitted herself to the "transformative magic" of some perky designers. She apparently, according to the makeover artists at the beginning of the show, looked like she was 50 years old! The horror! So she was waxed, lifted, colored, shaded, goaded, advised, redressed and reborn as a red-headed........um.......shy self-conscious person.

They actually displayed her standing in a glass box at the end of the show like a specimen, with the public guessing her age. I couldn't help but be reminded of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña and their art installation called "Undiscovered Amerindians".

In order to address the widespread practice of human displays, Fusco and Gomez-Peña enclosed their own bodies in a ten-by -twelve-foot cage and presented themselves as two previously unknown "specimens representative of the Guatinaui people" in the performance piece "Undiscovered Amerindians." Inside the cage Fusco and Peña outfitted themselves in outrageous costumes and preoccupied themselves with performing equally outlandish "native" tasks. Gomez-Peña was dressed in an Aztec style breastplate, complete with a leopard skin face wrestler's mask. Fusco, in some of her performances, donned a grass skirt, leopard skin bra, baseball cap, and sneakers. She also braided her hair, a readily identifiable sign of "native authenticity." (Postcolonial Studies at Emory )

The white woman in the "make-over" show yesterday was being offered as a "specimen representative of women", offered for judgement on how young and beautiful she appeared to strangers, but the ultimate judgement was her husband's. They brought him out with his eyes closed and we anticipated his reaction, his amazed delight that his wife was more beautiful than before. Younger. Lifted. Smoothed.... Timid.... Exposed.

Yea. He liked it. The passers-by on the street had guessed his newly beautified wife to be 38 years old on average, and he cheered at the news. She had pleased him. And isn't that what it's all about?