Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.
     -- Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker, 1893-1967, was an American author and critic known for her sardonic wit. She was part of the legendary "Round Table," a group of raconteurs who gathered almost daily at New York City's Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s and 40s to drink, smoke, and trade observations on whatever topic entered their minds. Most of the members, including Parker, were well-established in the New York literary scene and were employed by or otherwise associated with The New Yorker, in its heyday the slickest, trendiest journal of upscale city life.

People who don't know anything else about Dorothy Parker know the couplet quoted above. It's worth noting that at the time Parker penned it, a "pass" was more like a pick-up line than a serious attempt at what might now be called "date rape," and "girls" was the accepted term to indicate an unattached female who might be open to the attentions of an unattached male. It's also worth noting that she hated it. It had originally been published without her by-line, and she rued the day she allowed it to become part of her canon.

It does, however, tell us something about what it meant to be Dorothy Parker. She bore a lifelong dissatisfaction with her own appearance. She was small, painfully thin into her adulthood, had bags under her eyes, and had very poor eyesight. According to biographer John Keats, "What Dorothy Parker saw in herself and in others was usually the worst and almost never the best. [This poem] was not the lighthearted jape it might superficially seem to be. As a young woman on Vogue and Vanity Fair, she wore glasses at work because she was badly nearsighted. But she always took them off when anyone stopped at her desk, and she never wore them on social occasions....The couplet expressed ...despair over woman's lot."

I was first fitted with glasses when I was in third grade, and my mother nearly went into mourning. I had already disappointed her by being a girl instead of the boy she had so longed for. (For two weeks, until my baptism, she called me Michael anyway, after her father -- I once had a baby congratulation card addressed to "Miss Michael Yakimoff" with a note beginning "Dear Mike.") Then I failed to sprout curly hair.

The straight hair she could fix with Toni Home Permanents, painfully installed from the time I was three. There was nothing she could do about the glasses. I was near-sighted and had an astigmatism. Early on my mother believed that wearing glasses might actually cure my vision problems rather than merely correct them, although I can't imagine what might have led her to have this hope. She made me take my glasses off whenever anyone was taking pictures, so that the photographic record of my childhood shows a youngster who never really existed.

When I was in tenth grade she arranged for me to be fitted with contact lenses. These newfangled appliances were a rarity then, but as it happened, one of the foremost authorities on their fitting and use was Harrisburg optometrist Dr. Robert A. Morrison, whose office walls were lined with the pictures of his famous clients -- Carol Channing, Lynda Carter (Wonder Woman), Bill Cosby, the family of the Shah of Iran. "These will make you look less doppy than you are." ("Doppy" might have been a variation of "dopey." It was the word my mother used to describe any physical or personal characteristic she found unattractive, from stringy hair to sloppy speech.)

And so I wore contact lenses for thirty-five years. In 1992, thirty years after that first pair, I began to need reading  glasses. I was 46 and presbyopia was the first sign that I might have to make some concessions to advancing age.

In 1997 I told the junior doctor I saw at Morrison Eye Associates that I needed the reading glasses more and more and more. She suggested "mono vision" lenses -- one eye sees things in the distance, the other sees things up close. "You'll get used to it," she said.

I never did. Part of the problem was that while trying to adjust to a new kind of vision appliance, I was also coping with the unraveling of my teaching career. I experienced headaches and dizziness. I went back to the old contacts and reading glasses, but they seemed scratchy, and I needed the reading glasses so much that I should have strung them on a leash around my neck, a symbol of dowager-hood that I was not about to take on.

And so I started wearing glasses (properly called "spectacles" by eye-care professionals, "eyewear" by the fashion conscious) full time. I said I was declaring my independence from a society that says a person with glasses is less attractive than a person without, that attractiveness in any case resides in the outward appearance. Look behind my eyes for what's inside, I said. That's the real me.

In truth, however, I hate the way I look in glasses. I dislike the way I look in general, actually. I talk a good game, but in this regard I'm really quite shallow.

In recent months I've begun to take a renewed interest in my appearance. Two surgeries in one year will do that. I truly believe that the gall bladder problem had been festering for more than a year, affecting all my other systems, causing fatigue, allergies, and bouts of depression. I'd begun to look and feel sick and old, and to act so as well. I feel different now.

In August when Lynn* and I had our eye exams, I took my old contact lenses along. The doctor checked them out, identified the ones that were the regular vision models, polished them, and suggested that I work with them. They weren't a perfect fit, but they were acceptable and would help me get reaccustomed to wearing contacts before investing in a new pair with a better prescription.

And so, from time to time, I've been wearing my contact lenses again. I need the reading glasses a lot (for example, to chop vegetables without going cross-eyed but, ironically, not to see the computer screen), and I feel nearly naked when I have them on. I'm taking more care with my clothes and my make-up. I still believe that what we truly are is on the inside. But I've neglected the outside far too long.

*Lynn wears contact lenses by her own choice. She, too, acquired glasses in third grade, an event I treated as a wonderful new adventure. The first time we went to the pool after that, another mother greeted Lynn with many compliments about her attractive new eyewear. I sent that woman a thank-you note.