I am uglier now than I've ever been. It's almost unsettling. I remember Mom's once commenting that a smile is an instant face-lift, and I really need to smile constantly because when I don't, I look mean as well as ugly. In the past week two articles have come out about "Reasons to Be Pretty," to borrow the title of the play by Neil LaBute--a play Jonathan and I saw in New York the same year (I think) that we saw the new, highly praised production of West Side Story, where Maria feels pretty. One reason to look that way is that our faces are plastered everywhere even if we don't do the plastering ourselves. The other is that bullies pick on people who are unattractive, according to a recent study.
Before Jonathan was born, Mom and Kathy took a trip to Hawaii, and Mom came back with a name for Jonathan to call her: NaniTutu, beautiful grandmother. A few months after Mom's death, I was in Hawaii with Javier, Evelyn, and Walter, and I paid attention to this name when I saw it on a name tag. (Trust me. That's what her name tag says.)
I also found in in a book.
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