My mother’s best advice: learn to raise one eyebrow at the world | Life and style

WWhen I was about 10, my mother told me about the benefit of being able to raise an eyebrow. I don’t remember exactly how she said it – I think she described it as an acting trick, a useful skill for conveying inner thoughts.

We both spent a few minutes trying to raise one eyebrow without the other following. None of us could do it. It was more difficult than Mr. Spock had let on, and perhaps not so much an acting skill as a genetic predisposition, like being able to roll one’s tongue.

I don’t think my mother meant that as advice – she didn’t specifically say, “If you want to achieve anything in this life, you have to be able to raise an eyebrow.” » But for some reason, on this occasion, I took his statement to heart.

I spent hours practicing raising an eyebrow in front of the mirror. It’s an extremely frustrating task trying to isolate the muscles needed to raise an eyebrow from all the others that control your brow. If I had been a more outgoing, fun-loving kid, I might have found something else to do with my time. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t do it.

Finally, I succeeded: I discovered that I could raise either eyebrow at will. But at that point, I was embarrassed by all the work I had done. I couldn’t show off my new talent without revealing that I had been secretly training for a year, so I kept my triumph to myself.

A few years later, during my first year of college, I had the strength to appear in someone’s theater sketch for a revue. I played a spy – I wore a tuxedo and sunglasses, and I sat center stage at a small table with a martini glass on it. I had no lines; I wasn’t even supposed to move. No acting was necessary, which was good because I couldn’t act.

Everyone had lines – the action was happening all around me. My lack of reaction was part of the joke, but it never seemed very funny. The rehearsals were tedious. I kept thinking: They could put the sunglasses on a melon and send me home.

However, on opening night, I was terrified. I sat there, frozen in the lights, staring straight ahead, expressionless – which luckily was exactly what was needed. But as the sketch progressed, I relaxed a little. I started playing the role of the silent spy.

About halfway through, when one of the other characters made a reference to my character, I let my right eyebrow raise above the top of the sunglasses.

I promise you: the audience went crazy. They laughed and laughed. It suddenly seemed as if the entire sketch – which until then had been tense and formless – was built around this climactic moment of the eyebrow. Then people shook my hand and praised my playing. Holy shit, I thought. My mother was right.

Sometimes now when I have my photo taken for work, the photographer asks me to go through my range of facial expressions. I have two – bewilderment and discouragement – ​​and they are hard to tell apart. But the photograph with the raised eyebrow is always the one that is used.

My mother gave me a lot of advice, good and bad, but I almost never heeded it. She died almost 30 years ago, but sometimes on Mother’s Day I remember the one thing I listened to and raise an eyebrow at her.