Facing life with ‘Foolish Bravery’

Lesson 2: Laughter makes a woman beautiful.
Julia Child was born Julia McWilliams, in Pasadena, in 1912, to a family of California landowners. Like so many well-heeled girls of her age, she attended Smith College, the women’s college. Her mother had been in Smith’s class of 1900. Julia entered in 1934, with the vague aspiration of becoming a novelist and a perhaps unstated understanding that her ultimate degree would be an “Mrs.” She wrote for the college newspaper, then moved to New York, where she took a job at an advertising firm. “I had a very good time doing virtually nothing,” she has said of this time. “There was always lots of fun and laughter.” I can imagine Julia carousing around New York in the 1930s to a soundtrack from a Cole Porter musical. Fun and laughter; it’s free, it’s magical, but it requires effort.

I’ve known so many miserable people. I have one friend who, whenever I call her, sounds like the somber receptionist at a very busy funeral home. “Hi, how are you?” I say. “Oh, I’m working,” she says, in a voice that seems to imply that her work involves the unearthing of small bones in a mass grave in a war-torn land. This particular friend, in fact, has quite a nice job that I happen to know she loves, at an entertainment law firm. Call her at home, and the tone is no different. “Hi, what are you up to this weekend?” I might ask her. “Oh, I’m going to a party,” she says. And the tone in her voice implies that she is a soothsayer being lured onto the Titanic.

Full disclosure. I am not a big fan of the phone. Call me at any given time, and I’m liable to answer the phone sounding like the Madwoman of Chaillot: hurried or morose but every once in a while, giggly. (I have a joke with an old friend: When we know it is the other person calling, we answer, “House of Beauty. This is Cutie.”) At the same time, I’ve learned that joy is in the small things: how I answer the phone, how I greet the security guard at my office, how I ride up and down the elevator in my building. In every single moment, every single hour, every single day, I can make the decision to be happy or not. So if I’m having a crap day at work, I can choose to be miserable on the phone or I can be happy that I am on the phone with someone I like — as opposed to in an infernally long meeting with the weasel in accounting — and I can settle into the call and enjoy myself. “Happiness is equilibrium,” Tom Stoppard wrote. “Shift your weight.”

Scientists say that a smile, even forced or fake, sends a certain happy message to the brain. Sometimes when I am fighting the mean reds, I sit in my office or my kitchen or my bedroom and I smile. If a smile is the happiness equivalent of a cup of coffee, then laughter is a double-shot of espresso. I love it when a friend calls or my husband sends me an e-mail with a funny article and I laugh out loud. “Thank you,” I call and tell them. “That was my first laugh of the day.” That kind of belly laugh makes me feel lucky, like a gambler whose horse has come out on top at the races. Laughter is the best face lift, says the French writer Veronique Vienne, and when we watched Julia Child (or her British heir-apparent, Nigella Lawson) we’re reminded: Laughter makes a woman beautiful.

When I was single and shy, I discovered that I laughed only around my friends. I was working in New York as a journalist and was often invited to swank parties, movie screenings and book launches, and parties at such legendary places as the U.N. and the Rainbow Room. I often met interesting, fascinating men but seemed unable to get them to ask me out. Of course, I thought that this was because I was not pretty, interesting, or fascinating enough. One day, my friend Cassandra, who is a guru of charm and fashion, looked me up and down with a very critical eye. “Have you ever noticed that when you meet a man you like, you scowl?” I was sure she was kidding. “Yes, you scowl. It’s as if you were studying for a test.” That night, I went home and looked in the bathroom mirror, imagining that I was engrossed in a deep conversation with, say, Kofi Annan. The expression on my face, which I had always imagined to be soft and slightly thoughtful, was actually pained and slightly worried. Some women brood beautifully — Nicole Kidman, Dorothy Dandridge, Ingrid Bergman. I am not, as it turns out, one of those women.

I went back to Cassandra. “You are so right,” I told her. “What do I do?” She told me that when I meet a man I like, I should smile. “If he’s across the room, then wink,” she advised. This filled me with a kind of abject fear. Winking has never been my strong suit. I can only wink with one eye and it is not a sultry, effortless wink. It is the full-faced wink of a Little Rascal sending a message of mischief to one of his Little Rascal friends. Cassandra said that all I needed to do was practice.

Excerpted from “The Joy of Doing Things Badly” by Veronica Chambers. Copyright © 2006 by Veronica Chambers. Excerpted by permission of Broadway Books, an imprint of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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