Colorado fish lips

I just got back from being in Colorado for nearly two weeks—in Aspen and Telluride. Both towns are in stunning locations. The feeling of standing on the heights of the Rocky Mountains at nearly 14,000 feet, inhaling clean air, seeing meadows of wildflowers and rushing mountain streams is breathtaking.

And both towns, particularly Aspen, are dripping in money. The rich aren’t stupid—they know where to go and where to be seen by other rich people.

But I’ve got the feeling the women of Aspen and Telluride aren’t representative of the average women of Colorado. For example, I drove from Aspen to Telluride and stopped in Paonia, Colorado, a small town surrounded by mines and fruit orchards. In Paonia the women wear beehive hairdos and false teeth. In Paonia the women wear polyester clothes left over from the last century. But at least the women in Paonia don’t look alike.

In Aspen there are a bunch of women who seem to have been punched out of a cookie cutter, like an updated version of Stepford wives. They all have Jennifer Anniston hair. They are all rail thin. Beyond rail thin. (It’s useful to be rail thin in Aspen because all the uber-expensive clothing stores carry clothes sizes that range from size 000 to size 4. Those of us who shop in the “women’s” section at Target might as well wrap ourselves in a table cloth.)

But here’s the thing that startled me most about the women in Aspen (and the non-hippie women in Telluride)—they all have those fish lips that you see in the plastic-surgery-gone-wrong photos. They walk around town with frozen faces and glossy lips way out of proportion to the rest of their bodies. I swear I just don’t get it. When did it become fashionable to look like a domestic abuse victim?