Lauren Bacall with Bad Teeth
But for the grace…
As a kid, I was horribly shy. As an adolescent in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, I was starting to have friends, both male and female, in junior high. Then we moved back to Minnesota, and at 14, I found myself pretty much at the fringe of social. My friends were the other outcasts. We were geeks, building electronics projects in our basements, pretending to be on the Tonight Show, with jackets and ties, interviewing each other, and eventually, playing rock and roll and forming a band.
The music changed my life. Now we were the center of attention, literally on a stage. Even if it wasn’t particularly good, the sound had people watching us, and in those days, so much was new and there was so little to compare us to, we must have been pretty cool for some. That was when the girls started being attracted. The shyness slowly dissipated.
Long after the band was broken up, most of us remained friends and still saw each other a lot. We were playing in clubs now, for money, in some cases, weekly salaries, even. For some reason, one tiny detail of that time has stayed with me. You meet a lot of people in music, at jam sessions, concerts and events. At one of these in a place called “Mr. Lucky’s”, a middle-aged black performer did a set. It was good blues, but what I recall was a comment someone made as he walked away from the stage, revealing a tear in his jacket. “He’s like a would-be B.B. King with a torn suit.” There was a life story behind that man, and yet his being was reduced to that one phrase.
It was in a Paris club that I first met her. She was tall and slim and looked a lot like Lauren Bacall , the one from To Have and Have Not, with Bogie: “You know how to whistle, don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow.” So much so, that one of the other guys in the band asked, during a tune, “At the table on the left, alone… looks like a young Lauren Baccall, no?” The woman came up to me during the break. She was American, good vibe, nursing one drink for the evening. We went over to her table and I bought her a new drink. When she smiled, I could see her teeth were in need of some work, they were brownish-yellow and one or more was malformed. At that moment, I felt a pang of sadness. I was in a stable relationship and wasn’t going to go home with her, but I wasn’t going to be able to hear how she happened to be in Paris, what she was doing, why she couldn’t afford minimal dental care. In the context of the bar meeting, it would be hard to become friends. I smiled through my sadness and talked for a few minutes. Then I got up and said, “Hey, enjoyed talking to you.” and went to the stage. The guy who’d pointed her out in the first place said to me “How’s Lauren Bacall with the bad teeth doing?” I felt horrible, had no answer, and the image came back to me yesterday while writing an email. How easily we dismiss people as insignificant without knowing who they really are, almost as easily as we idolize celebrities of whom we know nothing at all.
