Beauty

Think you're in an odd relationship? Talk about "Beauty and the Beast. " Once upon a time, in a faraway land, a young prince lived in a shining vault, er, castle … Disney's moratorium on the tale as old as time is getting lifted! Catch Belle, her beastly suitor and his talking household objects when the animated fairy tale is re-released on DVD. (Tuesday) Have the urge to throw your hat in the air? Talk about "The Mary Tyler Moore Show: The Complete Seventh Season.

She was one of those--the physically perfect ones: tall, thin, blond, blue-eyed. I had worked with her for over a year, and I had gotten used to her constant lament. "I need to lose more weight" or "I need to have more electrolysis" or "I need to have more liposuction." She constantly strived for physical perfection and beauty. One day, she read in a beauty magazine about having her teeth whitened. For a few weeks all she could talk about was her yellow teeth and how they needed to be whiter.

Gwyneth Paltrow has been named the world's most beautiful woman for 2013 in People's annual list of, well, beautiful famous ladies. "When I first heard that I was going to be on the cover of People's most beautiful issue, I honestly thought someone was playing a joke on me and I had to reread the email three times," the 40-year-old said in a behind-the-scenes video about the photo shoot. "I was like, 'This can't be true.'" Also included on the list: Kerry Washington, Amanda Seyfried, Jane Fonda, Jennifer Lawrence, Kelly Rowland, Halle Berry, Drew Barrymore, Pink and Zooey Deschanel, to name a few. It's kind of cute, we think, because Deschanel's "New Girl" is Paltrow's current favorite TV show.

Whatever your cause for complaint - traffic, work, kids, in-laws - as you settle in to A Noise Within's production of “The Grapes of Wrath,” you'll soon see that the Joads have it worse. The epic suffering of the Depression-era Oklahoma family, adapted for the stage in 1988 by Frank Galati from John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, will make your annoyances feel like luxuries. Or it could , except that this revival, despite its visual beauty (a lovely spare set by Melissa Ficociello and breathtaking lighting by Elizabeth Harper)

Cosmetic brand Make Up For Ever is hitting the road in a giant mobile Make Up School to give women a makeup bag remix. The brand's team of professional artists will take a peek inside your makeup bag and tell you how to better use your own products, and which ones are ready to be tossed, regardless of the brand. Consumers can book 30-minute appointments online for one-on-one makeup bag evaluations inside the Make Up School. All you have to do is "like" the brand's Facebook page.

Beauty sleep does make a difference in how you look – and how you look to others. A new study finds that people who don’t get their beauty sleep could appear to be unhealthy and unattractive. The Swedish study published in the British Medical Journal on Tuesday measured the effects of sleep using 23 adults who were photographed before and after they were deprived of sleep. Observers then viewed randomly selected photos and rated their perceptions of the people in them.

Coach Pam Walker of Hart High should apologize for her insensitive comment made in The Times on March 3. She refers to her team as "tall, blonde and beautiful." Is being tall and blonde her standard of beauty? What message does that give the black girl on the team? RAFER and BETSY JOHNSON Sherman Oaks

In the midst of Skid Row, photographer Jana Taylor finds beauty in the children who live there "like little flowers growing through a crack in the pavement." In turn, Taylor's American Child Foundation, a nonprofit organization that she started in 1983 to bring the photographic arts to underprivileged kids, shows children how to find beauty in their own lives.

Is beauty a handicap for a serious actress? If you're an actor, you can be gelatinous and plug-ugly, you can have a Barrymore profile, you can look deeply average. Whatever your mug, few will use it to undercut your dramatic abilities. But it's different with actresses. Reading some of the reviews in recent weeks of Michelle Pfeiffer's performance in "Frankie & Johnny," you'd have to conclude that only drab, out-of-shape women should be playing love-starved working-class waitresses.

Fashion, the Inside Story by Barbaralee Diamonstein (Rizzoli: $19.95, paper). This book is essentially edited transcripts of a series of interviews between the author and such fashion designers as Bill Blass, Ralph Lauren, Geoffrey Beene, Adolfo, Norma Kamali, Mary McFadden, Perry Ellis and more.