Molly Ringwald's Beauty Story

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. There is no disputing this.

Last week the new Dove Beauty Stories: Four Generations campaign launched, which encourages women to honor the women in their lives that have taught them how to live beautifully (I assume inside and out). In celebration of the iconic Dove Beauty Bar, a product that has been passed down among women for nearly 60 years, the campaign is set to inspire the next generation with the lessons, tips and advice they have learned through the power of storytelling.

When I was invited to hear Molly Ringwald join The Moth last night in celebration of this new campaign at an event in NYC, I was thrilled. She was my childhood icon, though only a few years older than me. Molly has come a long way since the days of Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club – she’s a mother now, a writer, she’s lived around the world. I’ve written about my own wonderful mom here on this blog, so instead of writing a story about my own mother, I prefer to share Molly’s beautiful ode to her mother, as recited as a participant of The Moth:

When my mother first met my father, she thought he was a jerk. It was the late fifties and my father was a modern jazz musician. He wore dark suits and shades. His hair was black and he wore a goatee. My mother was 18 years old and worked at the local Foster Freeze with my father’s sister, my aunt Renee. When she leaned across the counter to give my father the change, he didn’t extend his hand to take it. She thought he was being rude and slammed the change down on the counter and stomped over to my aunt to complain about the rudeness of “that guy”. My aunt peered over to see who she was referring to. Then she saw my father and laughed. “That’s my brother. He’s not rude. He’s blind!”

In true romantic comedy fashion, once my mother recovered from the fauxpas of having misunderstood my father’s lack of sight for rudeness, she set her sights on him. The problem with this is that my mother is notoriously shy. Shy, but tenacious. (When I think of the qualities I inherited from my parents, I would chalk up musical ability and love of jazz to my father and tenacity from my mother.)

My mom reasoned that the best way to go about getting to know my dad was to spend a lot of time with his sister. It was a sound method, but it never occurred to her that at the time, my father didn’t really get along so well with his sister. Mom would just kind of hang out at their house, find a reason to go down to the kitchen to find my dad and just …stare at him. Her shyness kept her from saying anything…so inevitably, he would bump into her. My dad initially thought of my mother as that strange girlfriend of Renee’s he was always bumping into.

It was something, but after nearly a year of not reaching her goal, she decided to change tactics. Somehow she ended up befriending the girlfriend of the drummer in my father’s modern jazz band. They played at a club called “The Iron Sandal”. Remember, this was late fifties, beatniks, berets. Jack Kerouac…The Beatles had yet to come to America. (A side note: my mom never even liked jazz. She spent a good part of her growing up in Wyoming where she developed a life long love of country and western music. Hank Williams, Roger Miller. To this day she remains convinced if my father had taken up country instead of jazz, they would’ve been millionaires.)

She may not have liked jazz but she loved my dad. She’d go to the Iron Sandal and endure hours of intellectual modern improvisation just so she could be near him. Finally my wily mother ended up in the back seat of a car with the drummer and his girlfriend in the front. My father trying to make conversation said “So, Renee tells me you like hillbilly music…” My mom said “Yes.” “So whadya come out to see us for?” At that moment my mother fortuitously overcame years of shyness to answer him. “I come out to see you…”

They were married three months later.

It’s at this point where the narrative abruptly ends. It’s a story that I’ve heard for years, and it’s always ended just as suddenly for me. “So then what happened?” I’d ask my mother. “Well..you know…we got married.” In my mother’s version, everything fades out, just as it would in a chaste Doris Day film. Fade out on the kiss; fade in on wedding bells in the chapel. (In reality my parents went to Reno. They both worked, so they never took a honeymoon until I sent them to Europe 27 years later.)

I made my mother repeat this story dozens of times over the years. I know everyone mythologizes their family in some way, for better and worse, but for me this story, starring my parents, epitomized love. Both of them were attractive young people. My mother was fair, beautiful bone structure, deep expressive eyes—but none of this mattered to my father. It was my mother’s spirit, the essence of her that mattered. And it’s occurred to me that it’s also shaped the way I think about beauty. Growing up, my father would measure me next to him to see how tall I was growing, feel my fingernails as a child when I first attempted to stop biting them, ran his hand across my head and laughed when I gave myself that unfortunate buzz-cut during my teen years. But I always knew that these physical details had less merit than the sound of my voice, the clarity of my writing voice, the tenacity I inherited from my mother to survive and to thrive. Like any other girl, I was bombarded with images in the media telling me what beauty was—in the 1970s it was the Californian tawny blue-eyed blonde, not the freckly gangly kid I was—but for me, having the focus on something else helped to give me the confidence to be myself. My parents taught me by example to think of the big picture. The long run. Any kind of physical beauty is ephemeral. We are always changing, evolving. And beauty, like love has to have it’s basis in something real in order to endure.

My parents will be married for 55 years at the end of the year. One day I remarked to my mother how lucky they were to have found each other and she scoffed “Luck had nothing to do with it. I knew what I wanted, and I knew I found it in your father.” Perhaps it is only just a matter of will—of my mother’s tenacity. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the romantic streak in me, but I like to think there was also a certain amount of luck involved. Just enough. Not too much. Any more, my dad would’ve been a country star and we’d all be millionaires.

Watch the Dove Beauty Stories film on YouTube and be inspired to share your own on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter using #BeautyStory.