She’s the former head writer of Saturday Night Live.  She wrote and co-starred in the smash hit, Mean Girls.  She’s writing and starring in 30 Rock, one of the most critically acclaimed shows on television.  And we quite possibly have her to thank for a McCain-Pallin loss.

But Maureen Dowd’s breezy cover story (does MoDo have a setting other than “breezy”?) in Vanity Fair can’t get over Tina Fey’s makeover.

From the desk: “the author reports on how a tweezer, cream rinse, a diet, and a Teutonic will transformed a mousy brain into a brainy glamour-puss.” I admit, Fey-as-former-fat-girl is perhaps worth a few sentences in the piece.  But not the whole article.

Here’s SNL’s Lorne Michaels: ““When she got here she was kind of goofy-looking, but everyone had a crush on her because she was so funny and bitingly mean. How did she go from ugly duckling into swan?”

Why is it that every successful woman needs a makeover story?  Why is it that a woman needs to ditch her old self — whether it’s her hairdo, her weight or her politics, or often all three in tandem — in order to be taken seriously the second (time around? Fey, Oprah, Hillary Clinton, even my former boss, Arianna Huffington — each is a model of “before” and “after” lore.

I hate to be a broken record, but it’s all part of the problem that a woman’s looks are just as, if not more important, than her talent.

To that end, here’s a section that’ll make you barf:

The Hollywood agent Sue Mengers warned her pal Lorne Michaels that he simply could not bring Fey out of the writers’ room and put her on-air for “Weekend Update.”

“She doesn’t have the looks,” Mengers told him.

“Lorne brought her over to my house when she was head writer,” Mengers recalls. “She was very mousy. I thought, Well, they gotta be having an affair. But they weren’t. He just appreciated her talent. And now, suddenly, she’s become this sexy, showing-tit, hot-looking woman. I said to Lorne, ‘What the fuck did she do?”’

They must be having an affair! What a rude friggin’ assumption that is to make.

What kind of message does this send to women, especially young women?  It’s lookism, is what it is. We want you to be smart, we want you to be witty, we want you to be accomplished, it’s even cool if you’re a feminist — but you still have to be hot, too.