It's make up. Look carefully below and you will see Dowd with makeup and without.
With Makeup
Without Makeup
I rest my case. JH
Posted on 12/04/2004 2:10:20 PM PST by Pokey78
If I hear "Frosty the Snowman" one more time, I'll rip his frozen face off.
It's a scientific fact, or should be, that Christmas music can turn you into a fruitcake. It either sends you into a Pavlovian shopping trance, buying stupid things like the Robosapien, or, if you hear repeated Clockwork-Orange choruses of "Ring, Christmas Bells" drilling into your brain with that slasher-movie staccato, makes you feel as possessed with Christmas spirit as Norman Bates.
I've never said this out loud before, but I can't stand Christmas.
Everyone in my family loves it except me, and they can't fathom why I get the mullygrubs, as a Southern friend of mine used to call a low-level depression, from Thanksgiving straight through New Year.
"You're weird," my mom says. This from a woman who once left up our Christmas tree until April 3, and who listens to a radio station that plays carols 24/7 all month.
My equally demonic sister has a whole collection of rodents dressed in holiday clothes that she puts up around her house. There's a mouse Santa Claus and mouse Mrs. Claus and mice elves and a miniature Christmas village with mice, and some rat Cinderella coachmen in pink waistcoats and rats in red velvet vests and more rats, wearing frilly red-and-white nightshirts and nightcaps and holding little candles, leading you up the steps to bed. It's beyond creepy. I keep fretting that it's going to be like "Willard" meets "The Nutcracker," where they come alive and eat her like a Christmas pudding.
My mom and sister both blissfully sat through "It's a Wonderful Life" again on Thanksgiving weekend, while even hearing a mere snatch of that movie makes me want to scarf down a fistful of antidepressants - and join all the other women in America who are on a holiday high - except our family doctor is a Scrooge about designer drugs, leaving me to self-medicate as Clarence gets his wings with extra brandy in the eggnog.
I've given a lot of thought to why others' season of joy is my season of doom - besides the obvious fact that yuppies have drenched the holidays in ever more absurd levels of consumerism.
I think it has to do with how stressed out my mom and sister would get on Christmas Day when I was little. I remember them snapping at me; they seemed tense because of all the aprons to be sashed and potatoes to be mashed. (In our traditional Irish household, women slaved and men were waited on.)
It might be exacerbated by the stress I feel when I think of all the money I've spent on lavishing boyfriends with presents over the years, guys who are now living with other women who are enjoying my lovingly picked out presents which I'm no doubt still paying for in credit card interest charges.
I was embracing my Christmas black dog the other day when I read a Times article so scary it made my hair - and my genes - curl.
It was about how severe stress can make a woman age very rapidly and prematurely, looking years older than her chronological age, because the stress causes the DNA in our cells to shrink, and sort of curl down on itself, until the cells can no longer replicate. "When people are under stress they look haggard, it's like they age before your eyes, and here's something going on at a molecular level" that reflects that impression, said one of the researchers, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California at San Francisco.
So now, on top of all the stress related to having a president and vice president who scared us to death about terrorists to get re-elected, I have to be stressed about the fact that my holiday stress might cause me to turn into an old bat - instantly, just like it happened in Grimm's fairy tales, when a girl would be cursed and suddenly become a crone. Or just like this Christmas doll my sister brought home once that had an apple for a head; her face looked all juicy and white at the start of the week and then by the end of the week, it was all discolored and puckered.
I flipped through the hot new self-help book by Gordon Livingston, a psychiatrist from Columbia, Md., "Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now."
One of them is the cardinal rule of anxiety: Avoidance makes it worse; confrontation gradually improves it.
Yep. I definitely need to rip Frosty's face off.
Actually, this could be good for us. People like Michael Moore and Maureen Dowdy (my spelling) force moderate Democrats to take a cold, hard look at what they've become. Siding with the insurgent "minutemen"? Being afraid of Christmas? I - I - words fail me.
She's definatley not going to convert. More likely, she'll dump her family.
Her whole family is conservative, down to having relatives who volunteered to work for the Bush campaign.
From her past articles, including a recent one, I get the feeling her family taunts her on the holidays (For the record, they all seem to hate the NY Times, especially her brother Kevin).
This election, plus her family's politics, have basically driven her past her previous madness to a whole new level of insanity.
I love CHRISTmas.
THE CHRISTMAS LINKS PAGE
http://www.truthusa.com/CHRISTmas.html
I think you are right, and I think most Freepers know that, but I also think that many Freepers agree that she just isn't very witty or funny.
It's all a matter of taste, of course, but I find her prose to be dull, unfocused, and uninsightful.
In the interests of full disclosure, I find Dave Barry's writing very well done (and he is no conservative), and I also find more than a few conservatives' writings to be...a bit undercooked.
It's amazing Dowd has a forum like she does. But, it's all a matter of taste. Her fans have none, that is! ;-)
Did Dowd ever suspect that she might have been adopted?
She knows how she's percieved. Her family seems to hate the NY Times, everyone in her family is conservative and everyone around them is too.
If anything, she's just nuts.
...and it's fine by me!
My God, you're right.....tell the truth, the necklace was the give away, right?
As loony as MoDo is, her voice is in a way soothing if you do not listen to the words. Kinda like when my girlfriend talks to me after sex.
Maureen, in the spirit of the season I present to you, THIS:
Frosty the snowman was a jolly happy soul
with a corncob pipe and a button nose
and two eyes made out of coal
frosty the snowman is a fairy tale they say
he was made of snow but the children know
how he came to life one day
there must have been some magic in
that old silk hat they found
for when they placed it on his head
he began to dance around
frosty the snowman
was alive as he could be
and the children say he could laugh and play
just the same as you and me
frosty the snowman knew the sun was hot that day
so he said let's run and we'll have some fun
now before i melt away
down to the village with a broomstick in his hand
running here and there all around the square
saying catch me if you can
he led them down the streets of town
right to the traffic cop
and they only paused a moment when
they heard him holler "stop!"
frosty the snowman had to hurry on his way
but he waved good-bye saying don't you cry
i'll be back again someday
thumpety thump thump, thumpety thump thump,
look at frosty go
thumpety thump thump, thumpety thump thump,
over the hills of snow
PS, Mo, envy and jealousy kill ... but, you're already an "old bat."
Mark Twain would have been envious, because it is an American classic. As a childhood veteran of circling around the family Christmas dessert table, I will wait until near Christmas time to post the thread.:D
She should be boiled in her own pudding. And buried with a stake of holly through her heart.
She's miserable because all her ex-boyfriends "are living with other women" and she's staring at old age alone. Chickens do come home to roost.
I actually go for Christmas in a big way. I start listening to Christmas music on November 1 and I have most of my lights up by Thanksgiving. And they don't come down until Super Bowl Sunday. It's always a tradition in my house to take down the Christmas lights the day of the Super Bowl. Having them up so long helps us get through the cold, long winter nights. It's hard to feel depressed with all those lights! By the time they come down, the days are getting noticeably longer and most of the winter is over.
I don't go for all the commercialism and "rush-rush" of Christmas. I take it easy this time of year and slow down. Many nights, I'll sit in front of the roaring fireplace and blinking Christmas tree with a cup of egg nog and listen to some Christmas music. Too bad folks like Maureen Dowd are too miserable to appreciate this time of year.
You noticed that too, eh?
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