(The final edit is here.)
Every month I used to walk across downtown Wakefield after school to get my braces tuned up. Outside felt like Pluto most of the year, but Dr. Cashion's office was always as warmly chaotic as Fathers Day at a nursing home.
Dr. Cashion was a folksy man who didn't wear gloves when he touched my teeth. While I waited in an operating chair, his assistant Mrs. B would tell jokes, some of them knock-knock. Dr. Cashion teased her as he bustled between the six chairs. "Oh Mrs. B! Where do you come up with this stuff?" In all the excitement, mouth tools were plunked into and plucked out of old cups like pens. I'd burst out of there forty minutes later than scheduled and speed-walk back to school as the sky dimmed from gray to black. When the orchestra teacher glared at me for being late, I glared back.
The reward for my suffering was a smile like college-ruled notebook paper. But lately I've been forced to question the value of having an aerodynamically shaped bite. Because the stars' teeth are not aligned.
"Straight teeth are bullshit," says Keira Knightley (I'm guessing; it was reported as "straight teeth are [expletive]"). Amy Winehouse's mouth looks like Stonehenge, of course, and Kirsten Dunst's teeth aren't looking too regulation either; but best of all, Chuck Bass is a man of crooked teeth. So it's not like these people can't afford perfection. More like they're saying, "I threw my retainer in the trash and you're going to fuck me anyway."
Braces, once a luxury, aren't for the beautiful people anymore. They're mostly for kids whose parents don't want them mistaken for poor or foreign. The people I know who chose braces as adults aren't aspiring models or trophy wives, either. One is a corporate lawyer and the other is an engineer.
The problem with braces is not only that they're for squares; not only that they cost thousands of dollars, and are glued on by Mrs. B; and not only that once they're off, teeth journey back to their natural habitats anyway. Braces are also, when they're forced on kids, unethical. They make kids' gums ache for years and cut up their cheeks. "It's like forced plastic surgery for children," says my straight-toothed friend Josh. Without anaesthesia, of course.
So if you have crooked teeth, be proud of them. "I was totally obsessed with my two front teeth from about age 12-19," says my friend Tamzin, who had braces twice (and whose teeth I've never noticed before). "Then the second time they went back to being crooked, I said, fuck it - I must not be meant to have perfectly straight teeth." Let's all take the Tamzin/Chuck Bass approach. Perfection is for people who obey Dr. Cashion.
