From Teeth to Toes

Yesterday I lost a tooth. It was no surprise really. I was told twenty years ago that I had two baby teeth clinging against all odds to the cliff of my lower gum. Neither tooth possessed roots long enough to take root, nor were there ever any adult chops lying in wait.


Despite countless warnings from more than a mouthful of dentists, I not only continued to chomp down on popcorn over the years as if it were the source of life itself, but I did not have the good sense to stop at the kernels. Instead I lustily cracked them between my tender baby teeth like a woman lapping at a dirty pond located right beside the vast, clean and burbling source of France’s bottled water. I’m an idiot.


I got twenty extra years out my toddler teeth, for which I should be grateful. But I’m not. I wish I had twenty more. Especially after my dentist told me that the price of his implants are cheap at $3,000 a pop. In a desperate bid to change the outcome of my visit, I asked him, mournfully, rhetorically, how exactly toothlessness was going to enhance my new romance. I was hoping to elicit enough sympathy to spark a heroic tooth-saving effort. Not skipping a beat, my dentist offered his sage advice instead, like he’d been moonlighting as Dear Abby his whole professional life.


Dentist: “Your new man will take care of you, you’ll see. And if he doesn’t, then you’ll know he’s not right for you.”

“Except he won’t,” I said.

“Sure he will,” he said, encouragingly.

“No, actually, he won’t. He’s out west on a mountain. Skiing.”

He had no answer to that. But, later, he did try again, god bless him. He advised me to tell my new man not shove his tongue too deeply into the place where my tooth used to be. I think he was making a joke. But I was too busy thinking that my new guy’s tongue would not likely share a hotel lobby with me, never mind a mouth! There was really no other option. I’d have to dump him. Not the dentist, the new guy. The only thing worse than fearing you are liked for the wrong reasons – like because you have a pulse – is fearing you are liked out of duty! And worse than duty is obligation from someone you barely even know (except maybe carnally). You see, I can’t really call this guy a boyfriend quite yet. We are currently in that strange, not-yet-relationship phase of two people who knew each other as friends a decade ago, fell out of touch, reconnected recently and then decided to see if there could be more. That phase. That very, very, very fragile phase. So, although we feel familiar to each other, the truth is, we are effectively strangers (despite having made it past each others’ border guards).


As I sat on the streetcar with a wad of gauze the size of a pillow wedged into my very own Grand Canyon, mouth cranked open so wide that I could not deny I had become, for all intents and purposes to my streetcar mates, a mouth breather, I concocted a number of creative ways to let my beautiful new man go. I can't let him martyr himself on the alter of my new deficiency. He deserves better. He deserves teeth.

But I won't do it until he gets home. Just because I now have Mariana’s Trench in my mouth does not mean he should not enjoy topping a mountain. Why should my wee personal tragedy stop him from wrapping his ski-hill-toned thighs around the side of a mountain like she’s his bitch?


Yesterday morning I was going to write a post exploring the concept of “fashion backward.” But the dentist changed all that. When I got home I popped three blue Advil, downed some soft Ricotta cheese and went to sleep. This morning, however, I realize that writing might distract me, so I'm going to forge ahead as planned.

What is "fashion backward", you ask? It's that item in your closet that is not old enough to be considered retro but not new enough to be fashion forward. While shopping for an 80s ensemble at Value Village last Saturday to wear to an 80s party I’m attending this Saturday, I spotted a pair of red Steve Madden shoes so fracking cool I had no choice but to claim them as my own the way a mother, nose pressed to the maternity ward window, zones in on her baby without the aid of its identity bracelet.

I was so thrilled with my new shoes that I could barely contain myself when, the next day, K and P were gobbling up the food I’d made them for brunch, providing the perfect opportunity for me to prance around in my Wizard of Oz purchase. Look at me! Look at me!

Their reaction was twofold.

Number 1:

Number 2:


K confirmed later that day, when I could trust myself not to cry while inquiring if the problem was that the shoes were simply not old enough to be cool yet, that yes, that was the problem. By way of illustration, she informed me that she had had a similar pair of shoes three years ago. Hence, not long ago enough to command retro allure. Obviously, she no longer wears them. I remember a fellow artist saying something similar to me in my studio when I expressed a wish to paint something from the 1990s. He said that era was not far enough in the past to have retro caché. In other words, my shoes are not old-cool, they are simply uncool.

Although I get it, I don’t feel it. Because the truth is, I love these shoes. I love their bluey-red hue, their lace-upityness and their cute snub noses. I love their square jaw. And I love how they feel. It’s like this: I did not learn to love Led Zepplin until long after their hey day. But would a Led Zepplin lover fault me for loving Zep now? What difference does make when I learned to love them? Isn’t it only important that I love them?

I can’t keep up with fashion in anything – from shoes to painting to music. So I’ve stopped trying. In my little corner of the world, I am stubbornly clinging to my own brand of un-fashion the same way Superman spun the globe backwards to reverse time and the death of his true love. I was not able to reverse time to save my beloved tooth, but I’ve definitely stopped time at the place where my Steve Madden shoes are fashion-Liz, thus always "in". In my world, the only one that really matters, I call this style, "fashion present"!