what comes around

The Greeks believed that history is cyclical. Or so it says in this book I’m reading, The Bible Reader. In the intro, “What Is the Bible?,” it says the Greeks would be surprised at the way the Bible shapes history into this linear, one-era-led-to-the-next sort of thing. Because they believed that every age returns to where it starts. Or something like that. I read it late at night, before bed, and not always with my glasses on, so the details aren’t all there. But you get the idea.
And I’m thinking, maybe history still works that way. Maybe the Greeks were right. Because a friend sent me this email tonight, a link to a web site devoted to bad plastic surgery of the stars. And I wasn’t gonna go to the site, but boyfriend Dave came in as I was about to shut down for the night and saw the message and said, “What’s that?” and I clicked the link, and that was it. We started at Rupert Everett, went through Nicole Kidman, Al Pacino, Ah-nold, Halle Barry, click after click we couldn’t stop, and ended up at Nicole Kidman again. Or rather, I did, gazing at those alleged before-and-afters one more time after Dave left to pour himself a Balvenie Doublewood. Could it be true? Is her nose really different? Or is it just the lighting, or the face maturing, like faces do? But no, you look at what’s-her-name’s nose circa 1987, and then again now, and it seems clear. Plastic surgery really is the big deal everyone says it is. And it stuns me. Al Pacino. AL PACINO?
I mean, only yesterday I discovered that I’d drifted back into watching too much TV. Dave and I lay on the couch and channel-surfed. We learned that Channel 2 news in Chicago has a new theme song (“Turn to Two,” repeated several times), that reality TV is still big, and that an episode of “Mystery” you’ve seen twice before still holds up. But in the end, we felt sad after watching TV. Felt like something had been sucked out of us rather than delivered. So today had been filled with discussions about how I might rearrange my living room to demote the TV yet keep it handy for movie watching. Stupid cable jack. Stupid plasma TVs costing so much. Stupid me wasting more time rearranging household objects.
And in the end, the Web site solved it for me. Seeing all those brow lifts and nose jobs and cheek jobs and Chiclet teeth, I felt the Hollywood world shrink down to a sad little box, smaller even than my—no, I won’t go there, that’s not the metaphor I’m after. The metaphor I’m after is the Greek thing. See, I feel like the entertainment age—the one that brought us movie stars and glam legends, has become its own undoing. Somewhere in those before-and-after pix of Al Pacino (Michael Corleone, star of my eleven-year old diary for God’s sake! I had plans for us!), Hollywood crumbled on itself, and became glitterless.
I wonder when the cycle will start up again, and what it will look like. I hope it produces a delivery system that is smaller than twenty-seven by twenty-four by eighteen inches, and doesn’t require a cable jack.