Bare-faced Kristy

Well, I guess Kristy isn't really pretty then. But that's just my opinion.

I wish I could say that the lack of makeup was the only thing about Rachel....McDaniel?....Broussard?....What WAS her last name?....that upset me. But in fact, I didn't much care for the character's ENTIRE appearance. Trust me, I am not being ironic when I say that the entire cosmetics team on SWAMP SHARK deserve some sort of kudos - and, for me, that's not a good thing.

There is such a thing as being TOO authentic. Look at Kristy here: haggard, jowled, kind of lumpy. She looks like she's about 55 years old; if I had not known better, I would have thought she was playing Sophie Sinise's MOTHER! In short, I don't want to say she was ugly, but....she was ugly.

This makes me very sad. Much of the reason why I fell in love with Kristy Swanson in the first place was because of that old-time glamour (with some modern touches here and there, of course) she always had. Yes, Hollywood glamour is artificial. Yes, it is not how most people look from day to day, and there are many people who never look that way at all. But in Swanson's case, it's an important part of her mythos. Watching SWAMP SHARK, it was easy for me to forget for a while that she'd portrayed an Anna Nicole Smith lookalike on LAW AND ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT just four years earlier. And what about SKATING WITH CELEBRITIES the year before? There she'd been a lean, mean, fighting (okay, skating) machine, and had still looked just as phenomenal as ever! (I wasn't rooting for her in the competition, but it was pretty awesome that she won.)

I look ahead with this weird mixture of hope and fear to Kristy's next role. I'm looking at her IMDB.com headshot right now, and I am thinking (a bit wishfully, it's true) that that's a very recent photo. If it is, great - but she might want to shave off just a few more pounds.

And I hope she continues to look that way for years to come. There are quite a few actresses out there (Kim Basinger and Kim Cattrall, to name just two) who have continued to look really, really wonderful into their fifties. I pray that Kristy Swanson is just such an actress.