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Making a Spectacle of Myself: Helen Chappell
Making a Spectacle of Myself
by Helen Chappell
We, the vision impaired, have been wearing some of kind of contraption over our eyes for hundreds of years. If you look at some 400- or 500-year-old paintings of the Great and the Good, you’ll note that a few of them have some form of spectacles perched on their beaks or clutched in their long bony hands, usually with a book. A prop, I assume, to show their nearsightedness came from reading too much, as well as to convey the idea they were real smart guys. Or at least rich enough to have a portrait painted.
When it was discovered in second grade that I am as blind as the proverbial bat and needed glasses, my mother was so horrified or bored or dramatic that she dragged me around to all my aunts’ houses going, “Do you believe she needs glasses?” as if I’d suddenly grown
a horn or turned into a werewolf. This is something that I never let her forget until the day she died, even though she denied it. The fact was that both my mother and my father wore glasses, as did most of my aunts. So why this was a cause for drama, I still don’t know.
So began a lifetime of glasses. As a kid, I wore some of the most hideous frames the Eisenhower era could produce. Cat’s eyes, red plastic, lenses so thick they could pass for dessert plates. I managed to break them all, sooner or later.
I wasn’t the only kid walking around with Scotch-taped hinges or a wad of adhesive tape on the broken nose bridge or even a cracked lens. Glasses were not just breakable; they were ugly and a sign that you were an outcast in the way only kids can make an outcast.
I could also lose them without even half trying. The wail of mothers of children who have lost their glasses could be heard all over the land.
In high school and many years after, I suffered with hard plastic contact lenses. Maybe I believed
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Making a Spectacle ter I stopped wearing dresses and pantyhose to my journalism jobs, all those Forties movies where Ro- I stopped wearing my contacts. salind Russell takes off her glasses Probably had to do with my presand Cary Grant says, “Miss Jones! byopia and bifocals and all the joys You’re beautiful!” Of course, it of aging. never happened, but I believed in The styles I’ve run through in my movies and miracles in those days. time! Cat’s eyes, aviators, round,
Somewhere along the line, af- round tinted, wire frames, lenses
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the size of saucers, tiny rectangulars, cat’s eyes again, Mad Man retro frames . . . I’ve been through ’em all.
About the same time, frames suddenly became fashionable.
Celebrities and designers started bringing out their own lines. The cat’s eyes and round tinted frames of my youth were in style again. I could spend hours in the glasses store trying on frames. The trouble was, I was too farsighted to actually see myself in the mirror.
If I found a frame I actually liked, it either came only in some shade of nausea purple or the frame alone cost $400. So, I was back to the rack and more endless searching for something that flattered my pie-plate face.
Now, when you realize my lenses were as thick as coke bottles and had to be thinned, that I had to have progressives because bifocal lenses made me seasick, and I wanted a tint and heaven only knows whatever bells and whistles the ophthalmologist added on, the cost came to nearly $900. It’s no wonder that place is out of business.
I could have taken a trip to the islands for that.
But for $900 a freelance writer hangs on as long as she can ~ maybe hoping to win the lottery!
I won’t bore you with an organ recital, but the time had come for cataract surgery, and while the doctor was in there, he made some magic adjustments to my vision et voila! My eyesight improved!
New glasses were on the menu. While I was there, one of the ladies who keep the place running suggested I try one of those mail order places.
Making a Spectacle into my camo. After years of sterile, stark frames, I want horn rims. Nice earth-tone horn rims in a nice classic shape. When you can’t see the broad side of a barn door bald faced, glasses become very important to you, especially if you want to drive and recognize people across the street. So, friends, wish me luck. I re-
Now this opened a whole new ally want to see again. world. Like Iris Apfel or Edith Head or Doc Ock, I could make a Helen Chappell is the creator Fashion Statement with some out- of the Sam and Hollis mystery serageous frames! People would see ries and the Oysterback stories, as my glasses coming before they saw well as The Chesapeake Book of me, and I would have loved that, the Dead. Under her pen names, but frankly, I’m too chicken at my Rebecca Baldwin and Caroline age to go that far. Brooks, she has published a num-
I want glasses that kind of blend ber of historical novels.
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