Not a dry eye in the house
Okay ... here's the thing.
Of all the maladies from which I do not suffer, Chronic Dry Eye is one.
I make quite enough of my own tears, thank you.
But I want to all-out sob ... and/or run out of the room ... when this commercial for Restasis comes on the TV.
At first I was merely agog (that's, like, all big-eyed) at the smarminess of this ad. Upon closer scrutiny, I became genuinely creeped out.
Now I watch the ad closely ... but only out of morbid fascination, while remaining fiercely loyal to Clear eyes Maximum Redness Relief.
Not, I imagine, what the drug company was going for when putting together an ad for their fancy eye drops.
First there's Dr. Alison Tendler ... a South Dakota cataract surgeon who was compensated for her contribution to the ad.
Duh.
Dr. Tendler is eerily cute and young looking, with eyes so huge one wonders if they were not widened by the miracle of computer generation.
I don't see any toothpicks, so that must be it.
This person comes across like a backward zombie.
Then the way they arranged her hair, all girl-Doogie-Howserish, all look-Mom-no-tanglesish, is so obvious. Her look screams: "You have nothing to fear from my needles and scalpels and lasers because I'm actually twelve and I can't even spell ophthalmologist."
Then there's the spooky way she talks. Has she been drinking Restasis? Or perhaps a vodka gimlet? Did she perchance ingest a hyperdose of Cata Tonic? She sounds as though she's about to slide out of the screen into a relaxed heap on the floor.
But when she does, her eyes will still be open. Wide, wide open like Teddy Roosevelt's nostrils on that other famously expressionless South Dakotan landmark.
Then there's her "patient" ... who I suspect was also handsomely compensated.
Duh.
Vaguely and unsettlingly androgynous, this person comes across like a backward zombie when she slowly utters the classic line "Prescription ... what do I have?"
(Uhm ... you have DRY EYES, Toots.)
And when Dr. Tendler reveals -- quite suddenly and without warning -- that she too uses Restasis, this woman's hypnotic incredulity is so fake, one wonders if she's, like, really the producer's ambitious girlfriend.
"You use Restasis?" she inquires pseudo-amazedly, as though she's just discovered that Dr. Tendler keeps spare eyeballs in her lab coat pocket.
For snacking.
What ... did she expect Dr. Tendler would cop to a fondness for Visine cocktails with a Murine chaser, while the cameras were rolling?
You should hear what I have to say about many other prescription drug ads on TV. I'll bet I could entertain you for at least as long as it took Dr. Tendler and her "patient" to learn their scintillating lines between mugfuls of mulled Restasis.