Last summer I found myself again in one of my favorite places: in bed with my best friend and her dad making fun of whatever bad show we could find on t.v.  It’s one of our favorite pastimes on the rare occasion we all happen to be in the same house.  Mary gets in the middle and we channel surf for the wretched, the pathetic, the unbelievable.  It’s our version of date night.  It makes us feel better about ourselves.

This night we found a special on Primordial Dwarves.  Let me attempt to defend myself before I begin – it’s not that I think Primordial Dwarves are inherently wretched themselves.  It was this particular spot which showcased a Primo woman who wanted nothing but regular-size teeth.  She was about the size of a four year-old, though even more petite.  She must have been in her late teens or early twenties.  As she spoke in the squeak of a voice appropriate to a depressed, animated hedge hog, it quickly became clear that her baby-size teeth were the least of her problems.  This chick had the blues.  She croaked out a list of wishes: to be taken seriously, to look like a grown up, to date and fall in love.  And she had decided that the real thing holding her back was the size of her teeth – sharp little pearls embedded in her gums which she did her best to conceal.

I can relate.  I mean my teeth are pretty normal, aside from still having those little ridges at the bottoms and a set of semi-impacted wisdom teeth pushing through, I have little to complain about in the oral department.  But I get feeling that if you could just change one thing about yourself, everything else would fall into place.  Whether it’s physical, emotional, or psychological everyone has something that makes them feel like a short bus kid.  What I sometimes envy (in dark, misguided, self indulgent moods) about people with actual deformities or conditions is that at least it’s out there.  The fear of having to confess or simply have this horrifying emotional appendage slip out in public is eliminated.  My twitter name is @girlwithatail and appropriately so.  I don’t have an actual tail but I almost always feel like I’m hiding a freak part that I’m eventually gonna have to cop to on a date – or online if I’m really trying to avoid writing.  (It’s a weird form of self-punishment; when I’m being unproductive I go online to twitter or tumblr and reveal embarrassing truths.  Entertaining but detrimental.)  When it comes to dating, I might have an easier time getting a first date than say, a Primordial Dwarf or a guy with Turrets, but the odds of maintaining anything real diminish quickly after that.  If God is, as I suspect, an ethereal version of Wayne from The Wonder Years, I will wake up tomorrow with a tail or gills or tiny teeth the size of those ice-cream dots they sell at mall kiosks.  I don’t mean I truly want to be special in that sense, but at least when those folks get a date, they’ve already been accepted.  It wasn’t the hipster Urban Outfitters jacket or the cool aviators; glitter intended to deflect the inner geek and temporarily blind potential mates from the horror just beneath the surface.

The special ended with our Primordial friend meeting another Primordial woman who had gotten her teeny teeth replaced with normal-size ones.  Cautionary tale that she was, her chompers looked cartoonish and frightening in relation to the rest of her small parts.  The two dwarves, tearful and squeaking, agreed it was best to keep your small teeth.  Best to accept the part you feel is freakish and move on from there.  It would be a giant relief I guess to accept that the thing holding you back isn’t the problem at all… or really, really depressing.  Because that means the real freak is just you.  Not dating because you’re afraid you won’t be loved, that’s a whole different kind of stunted growth than my Primordial heroine.  I guess it’s like I once told a director.  I was playing the part of a mermaid.  The director kept insisting I play her very whispery and otherworldly.  Finally I said, “But Craig, I’m just a girl with a tail.”  Having a freak part doesn’t make you a freak; you just are one.  We all are.  It’s like a lizard.  Cut my tail off and I’d just grow another freak part to replace it.

Photo via NeilsPhotography