Sam it's time for you to grow up and accept responsibility.
What do you think of when you think of plastic surgery?
I'm here to get my snatch tightened.
Fish-lipped women on The Real Housewives series,
maybe aging Hollywood actors who kinda look like burn victims,
Michael Jackson't disappearing  nose or Lindsay Lohan's rubberized lips?
When internet slideshows of plastic surgery fails are only a mouse click away,
it's easy to think about face lifts, eye jobs and all the rest,
as the province of people who refuse to grow old the way nature intended.
But that's not the only way and it's certainly not the best way to think about plastic surgery
as the new documentary Take my Nose Please makes abundantly clear.
There's actually one class of celebrities that will be very honest
about cosmetic procedures that they've undergone.
You don't look exactly like the Joan Rivers I used to know.
And that would be comedians.
I take that as a compliment.
Directed by the nearly 90 year old journalism legend Joan Kron,
Take my Nose follows two actresses as they contemplate getting work done.
Along the way viewers learn the history of modern plastic surgery
and are exposed to a powerful argument
that plastic surgery is just one more way of improving ourselves
like diet, exercise and education.
Kron's wide-ranging, funny, suspenseful and erudite movie
drives home the libertarian point
that nips and tucks are about self actualization and self reinvention,
not immature fears of growing old or a sign of unrestrained narcissism.
Then I had a face lift, then I had a breast reduction but being Jewish they grew back,
I don't know how!
If there's one thing Joan Kron knows it's self reinvention.
Born in 1928 and raised in New York City,
Kron studied costume design at Yale's graduate school, she skipped undergrad,
before getting married to a Philadelphia doctor.
She joined the city's arts council in the 1960s
and brought Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground to perform at the YWAJ.
She began her journalism career at 41 years of age.
After the collapse of her marriage she moved to New York,
where she became the Wall Street Journal's first fashion writer,
wrote for New York magazine and was a regular at the New York Times magazine.
She became editor in chief of the high end lifestyle magazine Avenue.
She was in her 60s when she started writing a beauty column for Allure,
and in 2000 she wrote a book length account of getting her own face lift.
To visit Kron in her art-rich Upper East Side apartment,
is to be granted an audience with a woman
who has blazed a unique trail through the last century of American life.
