Withering Glance: Attack of the oversized eyebrows

Rick Nelson and Claude Peck dispense unasked-for advice about clothing, etiquette, culture, relationships, grooming and more.

RN: I'm freaking out. One morning last week when I was shaving, I think I caught my first hint of GOME in the mirror.

CP: No way. Not Gigantic Old Man Eyebrows. You're not ready for those yet. You're too young. Plus, the world's not ready.

RN: Seriously, it was so long, I could have French-braided it.

CP: I wouldn't worry. Your eyewear is strong enough to support the cantilevered overhang, no matter how profuse.

RN: We're not talking the sculpted, career-making caterpillars of, say, Robert Pattinson, Chris Pine or Zachary Quinto. More along the lines of the unruly forest of sequoias sprouting on the brow of Sam Waterston of "Law & Order." I heard that when the show's makeup person recently combed out one of his voluminous forehead tufts, Leslie Hendrix, the wry actress who plays the recurring role of medical examiner Elizabeth Rodgers, came tumbling out.

CP: LOLTTT.

RN: Hunh?

CP: Laugh out loud, through the tears.

RN: Listen, GOME are no laughing matter, mister. You look at the forehead topiary of Martin Scorsese or Andy Rooney and think: Don't they have a loved one who cares enough to discreetly hand them a pruning shears?

CP: Or, more practically, any of a wide array of inexpensive clippers designed for trimming outgrowths of the nose, ear and brow without bloodletting.

RN: Not exactly the sexiest stocking stuffer, as in, "Oh, honey, you shouldn't have. Really." Ho, ho, ho!

CP: Ladies, grab your guy, hold him down and apply the Braun or other device. Good safe fun.

RN: What's with the heteronormalizing? Surely some of these browbeaters are of the same-sex variety.

CP: Well, Christopher Isherwood was gay, but I don't see that his longtime partner, painter Don Bachardy, ever assisted the novelist in the taming of a case of GOME gone wild. Don could have made himself an entire set of paintbrushes with the harvest.

RN: Or a lap blanket.

CP: It'll be interesting to see if Colin Firth, who plays the Isherwood character in the upcoming movie "A Single Man," has had a brow job. Any decent film-studio wigmaster could replicate the famed Isherwood eyebrows in just a few hours each morning.

RN: Either that, or director Tom Ford could have cast Peter Gallagher. But maybe he was booked for that new biopic, "The Leonid Brezhnev Story."

E-mail: witheringglance@startribune.com.

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