Why Not Me? (3 page)

I bought this wand, the Tria Acne Clearing Blue Light, from my dermatologist’s office. At one point I was spending so much time with the device that I started calling him Wall-E. He looks like a fancy sex toy from Japan. His job is to “eliminate acne-causing bacteria deep beneath the skin’s surface,” and I have to hold him pressed against my face for twenty minutes every night. The little whirring sound he makes when I switch him on is comforting.

And what does Wall-E feel like? Like a tiny white-hot iron you are pressing against an already-sensitive pimple. It’s hellish. But it’s very effective at squashing and destroying pimples, so you don’t care. Also, I think I have a pretty high pain threshold, because one time, after a very long day of shooting, I was using Wall-E while I was watching TV and fell asleep. When I woke up, I had a rectangular burn mark on the side of my chin. But no zits underneath!

YOUR BOOBS MUST BE ON
FLEEK
. (OK, NOW I KNOW IT’S NOT COOL. I’M SAYING IT AS A JOKE.)

I have never had any breasts to speak of. In high school I wore the same white cotton Jockey 34-A bra for three consecutive years. It wasn’t that I didn’t have other bras; it’s just that I barely needed one anyway, and it was comfortable. I did this until one day in the locker room after field-hockey practice, Annie Devereaux asked me in a worried (secretly bitchy) tone, “Why do you only have one bra?” I lied and said I had several exquisite bras at home but I read that underwires give you breast cancer, so I never wore them. Annie was dubious, but the conversation had taken such a depressing turn that she let it go.

Soon after, I made my mom take me to Victoria’s Secret, and I saw what I was missing out on. I didn’t have to wear my stretchy white bra that looked like it was for someone going through physical therapy. My bra could be fun, sexy, and an outrageous color, like neon-pink. And that wasn’t all; they had thongs that had your astrological sign in little crystals over the pubis! Underwear didn’t have to be utilitarian; it could be a topic of conversation that announced your whole deal. My mom was supportive of this because I think she knew there was little to no chance any boy would ever see them anyway, so hey, why not? I asked her why she never wore underwear like this. She smiled and said kindly, “These aren’t for serious people.” I think she was right, because I have been wearing crazy bras ever since.

For events, I wear a moderately padded bra. I’ve found that a well-fitting padded bra can transform me from a pear-shaped woman to an hourglass-shaped woman. Okay, maybe not hourglass-shaped, but definitely, say, an egg-timer-shaped woman. For me, it’s not about being busty; it’s about evening out the proportions of my body. The reason I only wear them to events and not in my everyday life is that a padded bra can look a little
excessive
on me. One time I wore one to work when my regular bras were in the wash, and my friend and coworker Ike Barinholtz stopped in his tracks. “I’m sorry, why are your boobs so big?!” he asked in a legitimately concerned tone. This reaction was so much more offensive to me than if he had said, “Hubba-hubba.” I suppose my modest-size breasts are a constant that the people I work with have come to depend on. So, I will keep them that way.

LEARN TO LURK IN SHADOWS

Who is the beauty icon that inspires you the most? Is it Sophia Loren? Audrey Hepburn? Halle Berry? Mine is Nosferatu, because that vampire taught me my number-one and number-two favorite beauty tricks of all time: avoid the sun at all costs and always try to appear shrouded in shadows.

Lighting in television and film is the real key to always looking beautiful. It’s also the biggest mystery to me. I hired my cinematographer, Marco Fargnoli, based on one thing and one thing alone: his impressive and serious-sounding Italian name. As luck would have it, he also turned out to be a very talented DP, which means director of photography. Marco can take a foot-long square of orange cellophane—the kind they wrap cookies in at the bakery—and tape it in front of a light, and somehow I go from looking like Ving Rhames to Freida Pinto. It’s remarkable. In addition to his other feats (making the San Fernando Valley look like the West Village in Manhattan), he regularly makes me look like this:

Eavesdropping, the most alluring way to be nosy.

I can always count on Marco to make me look luminous and adorable, like that kid who is fishing from the moon in the DreamWorks logo. So my advice to you is: try to befriend a cinematographer and have him or her light you wherever you go.

SCARY MASKS!

When I was fifteen, I would wake up, wash my face with the same bar of Lever 2000 I used on my body, wash my hair with an all-in-one shampoo, and be done with it. Back then, we all thought Lever 2000 was the best because the number “2000” seemed so impressive. Were there 1999 formulas before they landed on this one? That sounds really well researched. I’m in!

Oh, how I miss that charmingly low-maintenance version of myself. Now when I wake up, if I haven’t gotten enough sleep, it shows. You know how on
The Walking Dead
when a human gets bitten by a zombie, there’s that fifteen-minute window after they are infected when they are transforming into a zombie, and their insides liquefy and their eyes turn into milky goo? That’s what I look like.

But no one in America will ever know that, because on those bad-sleep days, my makeup artist Cindy applies a beauty mask to my face. It can be any calming mask. I keep mine in the fridge, because there are two things Mindy Kaling likes cold: beer and beauty masks.
¹
The mask also makes me look like Hannibal Lecter, but at least he was a human, after all. After the potions from the mask seep into my skin, Cindy peels it off and I look like a woman you might want to be friends with. At least acquaintances with. Or at least a woman Michonne wouldn’t stab in the brain with her katana.

You can’t hear me, but I’m muttering, “You’re next.”

ARMS ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS

The most valuable thing I learned from Kim Kardashian is that your arm must never lie flat against your body. The second most valuable thing is how to do this sex move called the Armenian Strangler, but that’s for another book. I remember hearing her say that when you put your hand on your hip, it makes your arm look thinner and draws attention to your waist. I tried it and I loved it! So I started doing it whenever I was getting my picture taken.

I guess I was doing it a lot, because a blogger decided to write about it. This blogger had been semiregularly writing mean stuff about me, and this snarky post was called “Mindy Kaling Sure Likes to Pose with Her Hand on Her Hip.” The post contained a bunch of photos of me from separate red-carpet events with my hand on my hip. When I first saw it, I felt so bad and embarrassed. What does this observation mean about me? It must mean I’m vapid or, like, really lame or aspirational or something.

Then I realized it meant absolutely nothing at all. This person was desperate for a new way to dis me, and when he (that’s right,
he
, men can be catty mean-os too!) couldn’t find anything substantive, he chose this, because he figured, well, people probably resent actresses anyway for getting to get dressed up and pose for photos, so readers will love to mock her for this.

And then I thought, Wow, this poor sad guy. I pictured all the time he must have spent scouring through photos of me to find the ones where my hand was on my hip. And when he spotted one, Eureka!, he thought, excitedly dragging the image to his desktop while his wife was probably in another room, watching TV by herself, wondering when he was going to come out of the den. Why doesn’t he ever have time for me, she thinks. Next time my boss asks me to get happy-hour hurricanes with him, I’m going to say yes! This was a
grown man
. And that was his
job
. Which brings me to another thing I learned from Kim Kardashian: haters are just more people paying attention to you. And guess what? I looked great in all those photos he compiled.

There, I’ve spilled all my beauty secrets and it feels really good. Like, benevolent even? Maybe I will count this as my charity thing for the year. If you found this helpful, then great, and I am more than a little bit surprised. If this all sounded ridiculous and you are laughing at what an idiot I am, that too is great. Because talking about looks isn’t important. It’s just supposed to be fun.

¹
I’m testing out a persona. Is she cool?

SOME THOUGHTS ON WEDDINGS

I
HAVE BEEN LARGELY
silent about my attitude toward weddings. Anyone who knows me even slightly will recognize how unusual that is, since I am notorious for making impassioned speeches about things nobody cares about. Like, I think it’s a federal crime parking meters won’t accept pennies. Yeah, government, we know pennies suck. But
you
made them! You have to accept them! Parking meters are literally one of the three things anyone uses coins for and you decide you don’t want to deal with them?

OK, I took a couple hours off to cool off and now I’m back. People assume I must love weddings, and that is understandable, since the character I play on my show,
The Mindy Project
, has all but picked the DJ for the fantasy wedding in her head. And as a kid, I actually really loved the idea of having a fancy Judeo-Christian wedding. I remember lying in bed at night when I was eleven and dreaming about walking down the aisle with Dana Carvey, my biggest crush. All his
Saturday Night Live
friends would be on one side of the aisle, and my fifth-grade friends would be on the other. And somehow my parents were fine with me being a child bride, because the Church Lady was so funny and Dana Carvey seemed like a sweet and decent guy. Now that I think about it, if I
had
married Dana Carvey at eleven, that probably would’ve been a pretty good life.

But the truth is, I really, really don’t like weddings.

Here’s what I do like: love stories. Romance. In fact, most of my favorite books employ the “marriage plot.” What is the “marriage plot,” besides the most interesting-sounding movie Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant never made? This is how I’d explain it. You know how all those movie adaptations of Jane Austen books end with Kate Winslet or Keira Knightley standing outside a chapel in the English countryside in a wedding dress with the man of their dreams? That’s the marriage plot. A man and a woman are very attracted to each other but there still seem to be lots of reasons why they can’t be together. Sometimes it’s logistical (he goes off to war), sometimes it’s situational (she’s engaged to someone else), sometimes it’s emotional (he calls her family tacky and she thinks he’s a dickhead). Whatever it is, the audience knows in the back of their heads that these two dum-dums will eventually figure it out and get together and, if we’re lucky, there will be a funny sex scene along the way. But that’s why I usually love the marriage plot. Because you see everything
except
the wedding.