When I was about 10, my mother mentioned something to me about the advantage of being able to raise one eyebrow. I can’t remember quite how she put it – I think she described it as an actor’s trick, a useful skill for conveying inner thoughts.
We both spent a couple of minutes trying to lift one eyebrow without the other following it. Neither of us could manage it. It was harder than Mr Spock made it look, and possibly not so much an acting skill as a genetic predisposition, like being able to roll your tongue.
I don’t think my mother meant this as advice – she didn’t expressly say, “If you want to get anywhere in this life, you gotta be able to raise one eyebrow.” But for some reason, on this occasion, I took her assertion to heart.
I spent hours practising raising one eyebrow in the mirror. It’s an immensely frustrating business, trying to isolate the muscles needed to hoist one brow from all the others controlling your forehead. Had I been a more outgoing, fun-to-be-with child, I might have found something else to do with my time. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t.
Eventually, I cracked it: I found I could raise either eyebrow at will. But by then I was embarrassed by all the work I’d put in. I couldn’t show off my new talent without revealing that secretly I’d been in training for a year, so I kept my triumph to myself.
Some years later, in my freshman year in college, I was strong-armed into appearing in somebody’s theatrical sketch, part of a revue. I played a spy – I wore a dinner jacket and sunglasses, and sat centre stage at a small table with a martini glass on it. I had no lines; I wasn’t even supposed to move. No acting was required, which was good because I couldn’t act.
Everybody else had lines – the action happened all around me. My lack of reaction was part of the joke, but it never seemed very funny. Rehearsals were tedious. I kept thinking: they could put the sunglasses on a melon, and send me home.
Nevertheless, on opening night I was terrified. I sat there frozen in the lights, staring straight ahead, expressionless – which was fortunately exactly what was called for. But as the sketch progressed, I relaxed a little. I began to inhabit the part of the silent spy.
About halfway through, when one of the other characters made a reference to my character, I let my right eyebrow rise above the top of the sunglasses.
I promise you: the audience went nuts. They laughed and laughed. It suddenly seemed as if the whole sketch – which up until that point had been strained and formless – was constructed around this climactic eyebrow moment. Afterwards, people shook my hand and praised my acting. Holy shit, I thought. My mother was right.
Sometimes, now, when I’m having my picture taken for work, the photographer will ask me to cycle through my range of facial expressions. I have two – bewilderment and despondency – and they are hard to tell apart. But the photograph with the eyebrow up – that’s always the one that’s used.
My mother gave me a lot of advice, bad and good, almost none of which I heeded. She died nearly 30 years ago, but sometimes on Mother’s Day I remember the one thing I did listen to, and I raise an eyebrow to her.
