A New Wrinkle: The mad craze for Botox.(latest face-lift solution)

The Academy Players Directory is a huge, multi-volume set of soft-backed books, each containing hundreds of small, passport-size head shots of pretty much every working actor in the film and television business. If you're an actor and you've ever had even the tiniest role, you're in the Academy Players Directory.

The books are organized along the most rigid principles. For women, there are the "younger leading woman," "leading woman," "older leading woman," "ingenue," and "comic" sections. For men, roughly the same. Children get their own special volume. And because the directory is used by casting directors, the effect of all of those little head shots staring out at you is pretty much that of going to the local pound to pick out a dog. The "older leading" male dogs give smoldering, James Bond-ish looks into the camera, while the "older leading" female dogs try the slightly rueful half-smile. The "younger leading" dogs of both sexes pout dramatically or smile with such vitality and desperation that you want to take them all home, give them water and treats, and take them to the vet for shots and neutering.

Ironically, it's the comic section that's the saddest. These are the mutts -- the droopy-eyed types with weight problems and lips that curl down instead of up. The comic actor and actress sections of Academy Players are a checkerboard of what casting directors euphemize as "interesting looks": too fat, too skinny, no hair, too much hair -- and always, male or female, squinty lines around the eyes and a foforehead striated with wrinkles. Comic actors laugh, you see, so it's only natural that they have laugh lines.

In real life, though, no one wants to be in the "comic" section. No one wants to star in the comedy version of his life. We don't want to be thought of as having an "interesting look" by our loved ones and co- workers. We all want to be in the "younger leading" section of the Academy Players Directory. Some of us may not be able to pull off the "younger" part, but, given the choice, we'd all rather smolder sexily or smile seductively than put on a funny face and slip on a banana peel.

Now, of course, we have a choice.

The newly saucer-eyed Greta Van Susteren, when making the trip from CNN to Fox News, made a brief stop at the plastic surgeon's for an eye-tuck and a general face tightening. She reported to work not looking like the old, sleepy-faced Greta with the wrinkly eyes and the lazy mouth, but as something and someone else -- the "leading woman" version of her old face. She had "a little work done," as the kids say. She took a lot of grief for it -- and, truthfully, she ended up looking pretty weird -- but it's not like she's the only one. Anyone who has looked on the shiny, strangely embalmed face of Al Pacino recently knows that there is such a thing as "too much work," and don't get me started on Mary Tyler Moore.

But these are people in the public eye. They look at themselves in photographs (and the mirror, let's be honest) pretty much all the time. It's probably an occupational hazard. They spend so much time scrutinizing the individual parts of their bodies -- the eyes, the forehead, the flabby arms -- that it's only natural that they would eventually lose sight of the whole package -- the way the nose sits on the head, the way the eyes crinkle expressively, the way the mouth seems to relax into a grin -- and instead try to clip that nose shorter, stretch those eye-wrinkles tighter, and trim that mouth into a more rounded curve. The results ...