It’s No Skin Off Their Noses, or Is It?

It’s rather glib for Howard Rosenberg to suggest that Paula Jones got a nose job--as well as other personal modifications--to please her critics (“A Nose for News, From Tabs to TV,” Aug. 17). Any number of us, seeing our faces splashed, from every angle, on national television, tabloids, et al, would feel painfully aware of our less attractive features and choose to enhance them in order to improve our own self-image.

Rosenberg does right, though, to decry the brutality with which Jones and her features have been treated. All too many Angelenos and, increasingly, other Americans subscribe to this notion of airbrushed Barbie Doll perfection and mock people, especially women, who fail to live up to it. An ugly attitude, indeed.

MOIRA SHEPARD

Venice

Rosenberg need not subject us to his misplaced childhood feelings. Our disgust with Paula Jones and her ilk has nothing to do with her nose! She is the one who, literally, trashed her old nose.

KRIS DAHLIN

Venice

Rosenberg has had too much sun. Equating racist cartoons of Jewish noses with Jay Leno (an equal-opportunity insulter) and the media’s report of Paula Jones’ new nose is really insulting. I am saying this as a certified feminist. When Jones was pushed, coaxed and financed by the right wing to come out in front of God, all those cameras and a disbelieving public--a teensy bit late--with a suit against the president, she was the answer to an opposition publicist’s prayer.

Speaking for those of us who had to pay for our own nose jobs, you can’t complain when in the bargain you struck to trash the president, a little of the dirt you throw comes back.

LORRAINE LAHR

Studio City

I agree with Rosenberg. Jones has been badly used and abused. She is not now and was not before her surgery an unattractive woman.

If a new nose is what she wanted, then she is welcome to it as part of the payment those who have badly “handled” her owe her.

ROBERT C. CATRON

Rancho Bernardo

Finally someone else has noticed that the previously described “nicest guy” has turned into an incredibly mean and nasty human being. I could not agree more with Rosenberg that Jay Leno’s constant insults as to the physical appearance of certain women--in particular Linda Tripp, Paula Jones and Janet Reno--is simply not funny.

Although I have little use for Tripp and/or what she has done to the presidency and the country, to unceasingly insult her physical appearance night after night exhibits a meanness of spirit without equal.

VICKI L. QUALLS

Long Beach

Thank you for finally providing Calendar readers with Howard Rosenberg’s photo. Every time I read his column I found myself asking, “But what does he look like?” Relief at last.

JEFF RAKE

West Hollywood