An overbite out of life

If you draw out of love, as I try to do, and are completely and utterly untrained, as I am, and your 6th grade art teacher told you, as mine did, that you couldn't draw a straight line with a ruler, which I couldn't, then you may spend a lot of your drawing time avoiding having to draw teeth. But a likeness of Sandy Dennis without teeth would be like Van Gogh's Sunflowers without, well sunflowers, and since today is her birthday I've decided to stare down my fear of the pearly whites and put colored pencil to paper.

I fell in love with Sandy Dennis the moment I saw her on the late-late showing of The Out of Towners when I was about 12. My mother and I laughed ourselves silly as Sandy and Jack Lemon found themselves spiraling further and further down the rabbit hole of New York City. I still laugh when I think of her saying, "George, my hair hurts." 

Eventually I saw most of her films--Up the Down Staircase, Sweet November, The Four Seaons, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, and especially her Oscar winning role in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf, and her hilarious turn as a dimwitted Philadelphia nun in the Watergate parody Nasty Habits. 

Is it because of Sandy Dennis that I think overbites are adorable? Is she to blame for me ignoring my dentist's advice to do something about my own protruding top row?

I was lucky to see Sandy in a late career stage performance when she and Kaye Ballard came to the Bucks County Playhouse in the female version of The Odd Couple. It was odd in more ways than one. Sandy played Florence, the fussy one, and though she acted fussy and she could do the post nasal drip noises like an old pro, her clothes were sort of helter-skelter and her hair all akimbo, as if the soul of the fuss budget lived in the body of the slob. 

Reportedly she had younger lovers, dozens of cats, and a great old farm house. She would have been 76 years old today, and I think it's a shame she passed on (went to glory as my sister and I like to say) so young because I have a feeling that she would have made a really terrific old lady.

Note: I know it looks like her gums are bleeding. That's just how it goes sometimes. I refuse to apologize!