I never paid much attention to what my mother said, so when she said “Keep making faces like that and your face will get stuck,” I didn’t believe her. But on that point it turned out she was right, darn it all. And then Orson Welles came along and turned a misdemeanor into a felony, and now I’m sentenced for life.

See, when puberty hit, and I was trying to figure out what was cool, and what turned girls on, along came Orson Welles and he struck me as the coolest guy ever. He made a lot of TV appearances in those days, on the Jack Paar Show and others, and he’d do magic tricks, and tell the most outrageous stories in that profundo voice of his, and laugh deep belly laughs, and then when somebody said something stupid or inane in response to his towering wit, he’d turn and give them the “Orson Welles look,” one eyebrow cocked up, the other cocked down, and everyone would know he was truly, completely in charge.

I’d  look in the bathroom mirror and see if I could duplicate that look so I could be the coolest, like Orson Welles. At first, nothing. When one went up, they both went. So I’d push the left one up with one  finger, and the other down with another, and practice talking from my chest and laughing from my belly. I did it so much my mom started commenting about how much time I was spending in the bathroom. But I wasn’t masturbating, as she suspected, I was practicing doing “The Look.”

Over time I mastered that look and it became one of my signature expressions… aloof, askance, superior, withering… and I delivered it with increasing frequency to those more mortal than myself.  I thought the girls would find it irresistible. After all, Orson was notorious for his relationships with the likes of Rita Hayworth and other Hollywood Unobtainables.

Your mileage may vary, and mine definitely did. I guess I did OK, all things considered, but I was never the Svengali I thought I’d be. And now some wee slip of a thing from Edinburgh University, with a cute lisp, is explaining the reason. She’s appearing all over Discovery Channel and the internet saying that her scientific research shows that people with perfectly symmetrical faces are much more sexually attractive than those of us with asymmetrical ones.

So I’m screwed. Or not, as the case may be. Because Orson now owns my face, and it’s too late to back out.

Nobody was ever impressed with my magic tricks either.

Love, David

Photo & text ©2010 David Kinne