Mirror, Mirror no longer on the wall: How will I know I am the fairest of them all?

The psychological end of summer is here and it is time to take stock of a few things? Did we look good in that bathing suit? Did we manage to lose that weight? Now we are coming upon holiday season upon holiday season where the turkey, ham and potatoes will end up on our thighs and we will again hit the Stairmaster so that we can shed those carb pounds and look in the mirror without flinching.

Speaking of mirrors. New York women have an interdependent and fussy relationship with the mirror. There are mirrors everywhere and as you speed walk, with coffee and muffin in hand, you catch quick glimpses of yourself every 50 feet or so. Small apartments in New York, often don’t afford one the luxury of having a full standing mirror to check out before leaving at the crack of dawn.  You can catch your upper half in the bathroom mirror but the lower half not so much.

Even so, you also catch a lot of women putting on makeup using small compact mirrors in the subway to the horror of many others. I have heard some women note that the application of makeup is a very intimate thing and cannot understand how women do so in public, especially in a crowded subway.   I myself am not readily bothered by such an act. Time is short and fast in New York.  I always do about 3-4 things on a subway ride.  At times, I even have to try to fish my contacts from the back of my eye socket where they rolled to because of the dryness and itchiness of my tired eyes.  A mirror in such a situation is quite helpful. Although, I have learned to go contact-lens fishing even without a mirror in hand or in sight.

Mirrors can cause a lot of anxiety for women. As I have noted there are those women who are afraid to look at themselves in the mirror even at the beauty salon. They sneak a peak at the mirror in front of them when the hair stylist is distracted, looking away.  For many women, perhaps a total disappearance of mirrors one morning would be most welcomed.

However, if all mirrors were to disappear tomorrow the same way random people disappeared from the face of earth on the television show Leftovers, where would we be as a society?  For starters, I assume many people would be camped out in front of a lot of storefront windows just trying to catch their reflection to assure themselves they were presentable in style.  Second, we would have to come up with new ways of knowing where others cars are in terms of our rear.  Perhaps we would become more of a pedestrian and public-transportation society as cars become harder to handle.  Third, meeting rooms would have to be redesigned to find another way to make them feel bigger.   I suppose casinos would have nothing to worry about as they would continue to be their old dark, frenzied selves. Mayeb we will put solar panels everywhere to harness the power sunlight power to catch our reflections everywhere. Amazing, how mirrors are such an intricate part of our lives without us truly reflecting on it.

Without a mirror, we will have to become better in tuned with our bodies and understand how clothes fit our contours.  Without a mirror, we will look to the reactions of others even more so to our outfits.  Without a mirror, we will have to practice our speeches with a live audience to gauges reactions to our self-unseen mannerisms. Without a mirror our self-confidence will be built out from within. We will have to learn to better understand our selves by looking closely at others and understanding our inter-dependencies.

One thing, without a mirror we will still keep putting makeup on while riding a subway. That has already become second-nature to many women and I will continue to hone my eye-socket contact-lens fishing skills which entails in part making my eyes cry. Without a mirror, we will get better at self-reflection and self-understanding.

Without a mirror, I will look into my son’s eyes to look into my own and will thusly know who is the fairest of them all.

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