A face
About 10 years ago I was watching a British drama about a BBC news program in the 1950s, called “The Hour.” (If you haven’t seen this program, I highly recommend it.) An actor appeared, whose face I recognized. Not recognize in the sense that I had seen him in another drama, but it was his face. It stopped me cold. I wanted to rewind the program and look at this actor’s face again but I couldn’t. His face matched mine. He had a cleft lip AND he was an actor. His name I later found out was Tom Burke. The moment threw me back to the summer of 1978 when I was trying to decide which area of journalism I would specialize in my master’s program and I ruled out broadcast news. I would never be hired because of what I looked like and because of how I talked I thought, and went into magazine journalism. For years I have spent time when in public spaces people watching, looking for faces that looked like mine.
I know, I know it’s a common birth defect that affects 1 in 1,000 babies in the United States and 1 in 700 births globally according to a 2024 CDC report. The birth defect is most common among Asians and Native Americans and then, persons of European extraction. At theater performances during intermission I might see someone across the lobby expanse whose lip looked like it might match mine. I would quickly but covertly snake my way across the lobby so that I might better stare at someone who looked like me. One time at a gay pride parade in the 1980s I had someone come up and greet me as Linda. They quickly turned away after realizing I was not Linda. But I knew who they were talking about and I knew she had a face that looked like mine. I had smiled at their confusion. I didn’t want to look like Linda. For I thought her repair job had not been as good as mine as if I had had anything to do with that little project.
That project which I call “the betterment campaign,” throughout my book[1] was taken up by my parents out of a desire to give me a leg up so I could reap all the advantages they thought I should have. I should not be different than my peers. Homogeneity seems to be such a cornerstone of 1950s America. My parents were doing their part. We just didn’t talk about my lip. They just went about the business of correcting it.
What I didn’t know until I went away to college is I lived in a vacuum. I grew up in the same environment and the same kids who took me as I was. Nobody talked about or asked me about my lip until I went far away to college. People started asking me about it. Had I been in an accident? People were curious or rude.
These experiences in college affected my sense of security about who I was and my acceptability in society and, particularly to the opposite sex. Because of course our society puts so much attention on female physical beauty. For the first time I began to question whether people I’d grown up had just been too polite to mention it. Is that why I hadn’t been asked out on dates or get asked to prom?
Eventually I had an epiphany about my lip and realized I was not my lip. But why do I still occasionally find myself in a crowd, like at a recent ‘No Kings” rally making my way forward towards that someone whose face I glimpsed, and see a lip like mine that confirms that, Yes, I am not alone?
[1] The publisher persuaded me to change the title of my book to “The Perfection Campaign,” as they thought “betterment campaign” sounded like a corporate campaign and would mislead potential readers.