The face of evil...

It had never before occurred to me just how drastic the change in one's features is when one thinks nasty thoughts.  I mean, you don't go plotting evil doings when you're cleaning your teeth of a morning, do you?  The most the bathroom mirror usually has to put up with is an innocuous checking for random bits of spinach or mascara trails down the cheek.  And photos which show such a distortion... well, I'm one of those people whose photos are either great or disastrous, so I have always tended to assume that such photos simply fall into the latter (sadly much more common) category.

Last night, however, having returned from rehearsal, I was still running through a couple of scenes in my head, and happened to glance into a mirror whilst doing so.  SCARY!  I mean, we're not talking about murderous schemings here, simply a totally bitchy cast of mind, but even that had made my features incontrovertibly ugly.  I spent a fascinated few minutes playing around with this, and was truly shocked by the difference between neutral, spinach-checking mode, and thinking-a-bit-like-a-bitch mode.  Of course I'd seen my fellow actors' faces change on stage (one of my partners in crime in this particular production is a great friend, and a very beautiful woman, whose capacity to switch in a lightning instant into a sneering harpy is simply astounding), but I had never fully appreciated how little it takes in the way of bad thoughts to re-cast one's features quite dramatically.

This is of course going to be one of those things that everybody else has realised LONG before they get to my age, but I was very struck by it - not to mention hearing my granny's voice quite clearly warning that if the wind changed, my face would stay like that... 

(Oh, the eyes above are not meant to be an illustration of evil thoughts - at least I sincerely hope not, as it's simply a photo of the make-up for the Szymanowski opera, sans eyebrows...)