She's not Courteney Cox Arquette anymore. She ditched her husband's name. Which is fine -- I didn't take my husband's name at all, so I'm not judging her for that. But she did take his name, and then she gave it back, apparently, after a year and a half. Dis.

So Courteney Cox no Arquette is on the cover of the March issue of Jane -- a cover that trumpets the article as "Exclusive Courteney Cox's photo diary." But, since it's Jane, what they promise is only tangentially related to what we get, much as the article advertised as "Test-driving a pill that makes you sexy" actually turns out to explain how the pill doesn't make you sexy at all. Jane (Pratt) herself explains in the editor's letter that the "article" about Cox is less a photo diary and more the results of what happened when Jane stopped being a journalist (okay, that happened about four years ago) and "got Courteney to let [her] rummage through her boxes of personal photos to find pictures of herself and the key people from throughout her life to show [us] guys." (The rest of the editor's letter, incidentally, is all about how late the issue is, how Jane procrastinated finishing it, specifically how she procrastinated on the cover profile, and, of course, a good third of a paragraph making sure we know that Jane and Courteney are personal friends in real life and that their relationship made it hard for Jane to write the story. But...then...why not get a writer with no relationship to write the story -- especially given that what you put in the mag, Jane, you didn't "write" at all?

Because she didn't. The big exclusive is a total of four pages -- two pairs of facing pages -- of Cox's photos, with very brief captions dictated by Cox herself. And yet, a few of the captions do turn out to be quite revealing about Cox, to the point where I had to wonder exactly how solid Cox's frienship with Pratt is; if I were friends with Cox, I would have edited out a lot of what Cox says in order to conceal the fact that Cox has a pretty obvious case of body dysmorphic disorder -- or, if not that precisely, that she's just kind of messed up, generally. (Which some of us have suspected ever since we heard she married David Arquette.)

Cox makes with the deprecation starting with a photo of herself when she estimates she's about eighteen months old. Okay, she's kind of weird-looking, but whatever -- she's a baby! Cox comments, "Look at my ears! If a strong wind came, I could probably take off." H ears? They're fine. She has no hair. She's a baby. In another, blurrier shot, she looks to be about eleven years old and is excitedly grinning at the camera. Her caption: "At this point, I knew that I would need braces." Granted, the photo isn't perfectly in focus, but her teeth? Also fine.

Then, tucked away in the bottom right corner of the second page, is a tiny shot of Cox with Michael J. Fox in a scene from Family Ties, on which she played Alex's girlfriend for a couple of seasons. Other than her hair, she looks almost exactly the same as she does now. According to her, not so: "I was heavier then. You can't really tell in this picture. But I was thinking that I wished I didn't weigh more than him. He's a small guy, and I was worried I could crush him in scenes where I sat on his lap. I went on a big diet, and I lost a lot of weight between the first and second seasons." I suppose when you barely tip the scales at a hundred pounds, losing seven pounds or so seems like "a lot of weight." But I have seen her on that show in syndication quite recently, and there is no way you'd describe her as fat, or even plump. Granted, she does look "a lot heavier" than she does now, but that's only because she's very, very, very thin now. And of course she weighed more than Michael J. Fox: he's freakishly small! Have you ever seen him on Spin City? Barry Bostwick looks like he could fit Fox in his breast pocket.

Naturally, no retrospective of Courteney Cox's body issues would be complete without a few shots of her done up as Fat Monica. The shots are from the episode in which Monica finds a video of Rachel and herself getting ready for their senior prom; she's wearing this terrible mid-'80s shiny fuschia prom dress, with fluffy '80s hair. But the funny thing is that when I was leafing through the magazine in the store, I didn't recognize her in the costume at first. I was struck by a very pretty (if small) close-up of her face and couldn't tell at first if it was her, and it wasn't; it was Fat Monica. Her makeup is flawless and she's smiling a tiny, Mona Lisa-ish smile, and I'm not just saying this because I'm actually fat (without latex, mind you), but she looks good. It's an attractive shot -- possibly because, unlike on the show, she's not eating a hoagie. Cox says: "It took about three hours to get me into this 'fat Monica' makeup. But when I become her, I become the most uninhibited person in the world. I'd do this dance in front of the audience called 'the popcorn.' Made me feel like I wouldn't ever want to be fat. It's hot. It's really hot. It's hot to be fat. And I don't mean hard. I mean hot." First of all, I hope someone has since explained to her that actual fat people aren't wearing polyester suits all the time, and that it might be hotter for her to pretend to be hot under pounds of makeup and foam and with studio lights on her than it is for the average fat person going through her day. And second, I wish this were a real interview (though not one conducted by Pratt, of course) so that someone could ask Cox the obvious follow-up question of why she feels so uninhibited as Fat Monica -- or, the inverse: what it is about Thin Courteney that makes her feel inhibited. It seems to me that inhibition is a strange thing for a comic actress to feel on the set of her sitcom; I should think she would have to be fairly loose in order to do her job.

We end a tour of Cox's physical neuroses with her comments on a People cover story about her engagement to David Arquette. The shot they use is a candid one where she's smiling and looks...you know, happy to be engaged. Her perspective is different: "The People cover's not a great picture, but it's better than the article they did about me that talked about things like bulimia, which I don't have. And it talked about my 'painful breakup with Michael Keaton.' It was really upsetting. So after I got over that, I could care less [sic] about this one. I mean, I think it could have been a better picture, where my eye wasn't a quarter the size of the other one and I didn't look like I had braces or had never had my teeth cleaned in between. But that's all right. I don't care." Yeah, that last line about how she really doesn't care totally convinced me, too. Not.

I will grant that I have no idea what it must be like to work in the entertainment industry and have to live with the knowledge that your appearance is, really, all you have -- that it's often far more important to your career than your talent. And I can understand Cox's feeling she could speak candidly about her (distorted) image of herself to Jane Pratt, if they are, in fact, friends. I even believe that Cox voluntarily said everything transcribed here without being coached or tricked by Pratt. I just don't know why Pratt would select the comments she did when assembling this story, and I wonder whether Pratt should still count Cox among her close personal friends after this.

Reading the rest of the issue, though, made me wonder whether every other piece of editorial had been chosen as some kind of Courteney Cox Self-Esteem Meta-Intervention. First, there's an article recounting the details of a survey the magazine conducted to find out the most unusual things men find sexy about women, and vice versa. In a paragraph assuring Cox...er, I mean, "readers" that for every physical imperfection, "there's an eager penis to go along with it," one man seems to be reaching out to the formerly orthodontically challenged Cox: "Women with straight teeth are generally really boring." In the above-named story about miracle pills that promise more than they can possibly deliver, the rather predictable feel-good conclusion the writer reaches is that she's perfect just the way she is. Then there's a page-long story comparing the results when the writer goes out of the house completely devoid of makeup one day, and ultra-made-up the next, and hey, what a surprise, she feels better about herself and gets more pleasing results when she goes without all the war paint. Finally, there's a story by one of the magazine's few male writers encouraging women to engage in typical guy (read: boorish) behaviour like punching walls, scratching one's genitals, and urinating outside -- the conclusion being that women feel empowered when they shrug off the restrictions of female socialization.

Get it? I do. Do you think Courteney Cox no Arquette does?