Sometimes I think that life would have been so much easier if I had remained a blonde.
I was born a blonde, you see. I was a blonde for the first seven years of my life until my hair gradually darkened. Then I was a blonde in the summer and a reddish chestnutty blonde in the winter. Finally, it stopped turning blonde all together and left me with my strange chestnutty brown hair with little specks of gold to remind me of what once had been.
(sigh)
All that blonde greatness ripped from my fingers.
Now I go through life with the attitude of a diva and the head of a housekeeper.
When I was shopping for hairstylists, they would taunt me by saying “With your complexion, you should think about going either really light or really dark.” Of course, God’s idea of a joke is the fact that my eyebrows are a shade darker than my hair, thus eliminating the possibility of becoming a bottle blonde.
It just makes me hate Reese Witherspoon with a whole new intensity.
For awhile, I was having my hair coloured reguarly…. two shades darker than my natural shade, with a hint of boysenberry for kick. The day of Mo’s wedding, I went in for a touch up with a different stylist (this again was during my experimental time) and ended up looking like Morticia Addams. It was a good thing I had Doc Martens, as I was successfully pulling off a goth punk thing at the time.
I was frantic as Esteban and I were getting ready for the wedding, not wanting to face the comments that my mother and M.G. would make. My mother, bless her entirely gray head, has been colouring her hair since she was 26, but she exacts great pain on me for doing it… I think it makes her feel old, or perhaps she is trying to exert a little parental control to make up for the utter lack thereof when I was in high school.
To assuage my fears, Esteban shaved his entire face. His theory was that my family would be so shocked at seeing his clean-shaven face, a site they had never before seen, that they would completely ignore my homage to Marilyn Manson.
Esteban led me into the reception. The first words from my mother’s face “My God Weetabix…. did you go crazy with a bottle of black shoe polish?” M.G. has been dying her hair pitch black for forty years in effort to further similliarties to Jane Russell (which, in fact, she does resemble, mostly due to the 1950’s conical pointed bras she hoists her girls with). M.G. had the grace to ask if I was trying to cover up gray (I had not yet begun to discover gray hairs then).
Gotta love ’em.
Had I stayed blonde, I wouldn’t have to worry about it…. one does not notice a gray hair amongst blonde ones until they have equaled them in number. Or maybe blondes just forget about them. Who knows.
Still hate Reese Witherspoon though. Hate her quirky self all to bits.
