d a v i d h u d s o n

Back when I was still flirting with acting and found myself on the most professional movie set I'd been on yet, the director told the make-up person to accentuate the scar. My minor role was that of the assistant to the villain, so the scar, a two-inch gash levitating above my right eyebrow, chasing my receding hairline, and far more pronounced then than it is now, was just the accessory for an antagonist. A few months earlier, I was chasing the cat. Eliot, the cat, wanted to be chased. It had become an evening routine we're both a bit old for now. These evenings, I'm more likely to be chased myself. My two year old son likes to wrench his fingers into claws, roar and go. I throw up my hands and make for the nearest exit. And I'm not always pretending.
	But I digress. Eliot was a sleek and agile cat in those days, and keeping up with him was not child's play by any means. But sometimes, right in mid-chase, he'd freeze and peer up at me, just to make sure the chase was not real and that I was not hissing in genuine anger. That's when I had to leap and stomp to get him going again. I knew he wasn't truly finished with the game until he strolled out to the middle of the living room floor and fell over onto his side, purring: Game Over. Always too soon for me, so I took to leaping and stomping even before he showed signs of letting up. I'd be leaping and stomping on the run, even. And during one particularly enthusiastic run, I leapt. But before my feet stomped back down on the floor, my head stomped against the door frame of the nearest exit.
It hurt. And I was on my back. Laughing because I knew it must have looked utterly ridiculous, but also because I thought I'd be back on my feet again in a minute. I tried, though, and it didn't really work. This is when my wife and daughter came over and stopped laughing. Dagmar, my wife, saw right away that this was no job for your basic household bandaid. So I got to meet the team working the night shift at the nearest hospital, a pleasant bunch, and my daughter got to stay up late and watch them sew my forehead back together. The director's idea was that I'd look like someone who's been around. Maybe my character had been in a knife fight, or had run up against an underground network of smugglers, kidnappers and other villains. My character had wrestled with the darker elements of the world, and my scar was the badge to prove it. It would have been perfectly ludicrous, of course, to imagine that my character had ever chased a cat.
	Received: by www.inx.de (Smail3.2.0.96inx) from [195.21.31.93] (195.21.246.69) with esmtp id <m0yPaIy-000olxC>; Thu, 16 Apr 1998 00:05:20 +0200 (MET DST) Message-Id: <v03110717b15afb53fc8b@[195.21.31.93]> In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19980415213255.006b9024@pop.hol.fr> References: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980415142808.17107A-100000@echonyc.com> Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="============_-1319437292==_============" To: pleine peau<edite@pleine-peau.com> From: David Hudson <dwh@berlin.snafu.de> Subject: Scar!
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