She is the anti-Suzy Chapstick. The dark side of the bright-eyed, sparkly girls on the cover of Seventeen magazine. In her smile outside the courthouse reside the dream-free lives of our youth, raised on a steady diet of soulless pop music and cinematic ultraviolence, on assaultive TV advertising fueled by fathomless, limitless greed.
It has been said that certain faces reflect the times we live in, and in her case—in her smile—that rings particularly true. Of all the smiles that have captured our consciousness through the ages—those described in books, flickering on celluloid, beaming out of glossy color photographs and glowing on the painter’s canvas—hers is the first Death Smile. As we wade warily into the penultimate decade of the twentieth century, hers is the Smile for Our Times—a baring of teeth, as chilling and inevitable as a mushroom cloud.
You can look away from her—and look away you will—but those dead eyes will follow you. You will never forget.
Kelly Michelle Lund is our Mona Lisa. We brought her on ourselves.
EXCERPTED FROM
“A Smile for the Ages” by Sebastian Todd
Los Angeles Times Op Ed
March 3, 1981