but no word for “love”—there’s that old saw about the underlying proportions of the ideal female form being the same the world over, regardless of epoch or region; the Venus of Willendorf is to Cindy Crawford is to a lovely young bride in Micronesia is to the paragon of Inuit beauty, and on and on. The woman running through her lines right now is walking, universal perfection. She is lung-collapsingly, jaw-achingly, fall-down-on-the-sidewalk-teeth-first-take-a-bottle-of-pills-and-throw-yourself-out-a-window beautiful. The planes and angles of her face are a mathematical equation adding up to a great cosmic Yes. She’s hardly alone in her beauty, in this rehearsal room of a major soap opera called, for the sake of discretion, Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Pretty well everyone here is beautiful. Even the older actors are finely preserved and good-looking, all silver birch and beaten gold, except perhaps for the oldest woman, who has a dowager’s hump and has been on the show for decades, since it started as a radio drama, when that sort of thing was beside the point.
