Please smile

This Blog is an experiment. If I decide it has any value at all I will post it. My feelings about my subject have crystallized with the printing of face studies of all sorts of people most of whom are females in the Fifth Anniversary issue of the New York Times Style magazine. In order to show styles it seems necessary to put human faces in the way. I don't criticize the photographers for the depressing expressions on all the faces on a page inside the cover but I think those who select the faces are in dire need of psychological counseling. There we see faces of 40 examples of human animals with only one with any semblance of happiness. I suspect the smiling male had seen the other 39 faces and reacted at all the sour expressions with laughter to think of his face being among those funeral parlor attendees expressions. That was my first impression that everybody shown looked like so many faces I have seen at wakes. I am past my 90th birthday and therefore have seen a lot of wakes with all the expressions pictured. On close examination of some there is the slight taint of disgust. On most there is an expression of boredom in the extreme. Others have a, "get me out of here" look about them. I then found myself distracted by flipping through the thick volume and there, lo and behold were four beautiful smiling faces any of whom I would be delighted to sit and talk with. It is an ad for some tropical island country I have heard mentioned but know nothing about, BANANA REPUBLIC. However this publication is attempting to sell styles to women so those who select the female expressions deem to think all women are bored so the ads should be appealing by making the models or whoever more boring than the readers. That is a sad commentary and most of my female friends among a writing group are over 60 and all are a happy looking as well as acting group. However whoever assembled and put that page together had a sense of humor and decided that the last word should be a young adult female animal with only a pair of baggy pants on looking out over an ocean with her back to us. A metaphor?