If I honestly answer the question myself, I will say I am smart and pretty. And my brain begins to produce receipts in protest – mine aren’t crisp and new like text messages and social check-ins, but they are yellow and antiquated like all the things that people have said over the years that replay in my thoughts. And in the end the lesson I’ve learned is that I cannot be both smart and pretty. The good news is that I really am smart and I really do know that you can be both. The bad news is it’s hard for me to believe it can be true for myself.
The funniest time I pitted “smart” against “pretty” and later chose smart, forsaking pretty, was during a trip to NYC. Before this trip I had just gotten tri-color highlights and cut my hair into short layers. For about two months my hair was delightful and mesmerizing. Yep. Mesmerizing – other people confirmed it. The colors and the shine and the bounce was mesmerizing. I worked to make the rest of me look like a person who would have mesmerizing hair and I was falling deeper in love with my appearance by the second. By the time we arrived at our hotel in New York, a stop that was just supposed to be enough time to check in and drop our luggage because we were hungry, I was so in love with myself with the reflection in the mirror that soon I was oblivious to the outside world. I didn’t even notice that my sister was ready to go, just sitting in a chair waiting on me, patience waning, while I was literally standing in the mirror brushing my hair just to watch it smooth out and spring back into place. I wore makeup and contacts lenses, and I was in love with the girl in the mirror. We joked about my primping and left on the search for food.
When we traveled to Manhattan – before we used smartphones for GPS step-by-step directions – I fell into the navigator role. I could get us where we needed to go better than anyone else. As this wasn’t our first trip to NYC I was expected to take on my navigator role and get us around. I walked with the same confidence of a person who knew exactly where she was going, but we spent a lot of time lost. We approached an intersection after spending too much time walking to not have reached our destination and determined we were lost enough to ask two nearby police officers to help us find our way. We weren’t too far off-course thankfully, but we’d spent some time sort of going in circles thanks to me. The officers gave us one or two directions and said we’d see the place we were looking for when we got to the intersection. My sister pointed to the sign I didn’t see just before I guided us in the wrong direction again and in her exasperation, she said that my wearing lip gloss had done something to my brain. We were joking, of course, but it truly felt like I’d applied lip gloss and wiped my brain at the same time.
When we talk about that trip, we continue to laugh about it because the only memory I have of the trip was how I looked. And on that trip we visited a lot of places that I swear I have never been, like the Schomburg. And weirdly all of our photographs from that trip are missing. It’s like all evidence that we went on this trip is gone except for my Playbill. My sister and I even took a picture under The Apollo sign like Phylicia and Debbie and I cannot believe that picture is gone.
As I said, I’m smart, so I know lip gloss isn’t truly kryptonite, but I can’t tell you how much “evidence” I can provide where I can’t do basic math or understand concepts when I’ve applied makeup and like my hairstyle or outfit. So, my sister who is smart and pretty, sort of took over the rest of the trip, while continuing to wear her lip gloss. If logic says that lip gloss is wiping my brain, wouldn’t that same logic say that the same lip gloss was wiping her brain? Why do I believe she can be smart and pretty but that I have to choose between smart or pretty for myself?
When I was younger I believed myself to be the smartest kid in the room. And there was no shortage of adults telling me so. And when I was younger I thought I was so pretty. And there was no shortage of adults telling me so – in between calling me all kinds of fat-girl. But somewhere along the way I learned and believed I had to choose between pretty and smart.
I am Regina Lynette 