WOULDN’T YOU KNOW IT?

I woke up a month or so ago and took a good look at my thinning hair and its effect on the wrinkles on my face. It was clearly a cry for help; namely another wig/hairpiece/style. There seems to be some sort of stigma attached to the wearing of a wig, so we will refer to it as a “style”. I have no idea why this disturbs some people. Celebrities obviously would never be caught dead in their own scraggly locks. Watching an old Lucille Ball show, Dr. Advice chirped “There! You can see she isn’t wearing a wig!” Really?! I don’t think his poor old eyes were twirling in the right direction. Not only is she wearing a wig, it isn’t even the right shade of red.

Anyway, I ordered one from a reputable place in whom I placed great trust that they would choose a complimentary shade of grey from their 50 choices. Wen it came, I thought it must be wrong, because my hair is blonde-ish, not silver. Well, Dr. A. liked it anyway, so I wore it to Seattle, and first cracker out of the barrel—my daughter did not. I hung it over a door knob during my visit and vowed to try again.

This time I bought from a catalogue with a picture of my hair color. The trick to ordering from the catalogue is to cover up the faces because they use adorable young women as models, who probably don’t need a wig anyway. You have to imagine yourself wearing it and flipping it about as you would something actually attached to your head. You don’t want it to scream “WIG” do you?

I loved it immediately and plopped it on my head to show Dr. A. I got a thumbs up, so I wore it to Southern California to visit my other daughter. She loved it too, so we went out to lunch at a favorite Mexican place in Camarillo, which is conveniently next door to a wig shoppe. ( I spell it that old fashioned way because it is just on the verge of being posh.) We had with us that day our eight year old great granddaughter Savanna, who flipped out when she saw all the plastic heads staring at us from the window dressed in varying lengths and shades of blonde, brown, black and even one with purple strands throughout, (it was Halloween). Naturally we went in, and since I was wearing the new style, I asked the lady behind the desk if she thought it could use some touches. She played around with it, gave it a spritz of hair spray and off I went, pleased as a puppy with a new bone.

That evening my friend Greg said he wouldn’t have known it was a ‘you-know-what’ and I choose to believe him. Now it sits alongside all my other hair styles, some of which really are not my color anymore; there may even be a strawberry blonde one because I always wanted to be a redhead. They probably have more fun than blondes. Vanity, thy name is woman. (I read that somewhere years ago when I was first married. It obviously made no impression.) This will now give Savanna something more to dwell on along with what she calls my fake teeth and fake shoulder. The rest of her family is perking along on all fours.

Forgive the idiocy, I simply had to tell you.

YOU CAN’T TRUST YOUR MIRROR

I have always felt that the mirror takes advantage of our gullibility. For instance, when I pass a mirror, I see a middle-aged blonde woman, who at one time, if not exactly pretty, is at least interesting.

The word ‘interesting’ is interesting in itself. It’s a word people often use to comment on something, rather than telling them what they really think. If they don’t want to insult the artist’s latest effort, which they hate, it seems kinder to tell them it’s interesting.

Some years ago while we were at a family gathering, while watching a cousin across the room, a relative said “You’re not attractive, and I’m not attractive, but she’s attractive. To show that I don’t hold grudges, I am still speaking to her.

But back to the mirror, I was shocked to find from a photograph, that my hair is silver! Everyone else had told me it was, but I chose to believe my mirror. In the 70’s, when hippie clothes were in style, I bought a long denim dress, which I thought was quite cool. But when I saw a photograph of myself wearing it, I looked just like a mushroom in a long blue dress. The mirror had lied once more.

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I don’t obsess about my clothes, but I must confess that I do have a fixation about my hair. Along with so many other things that youth steals, I truly miss having good hair. Throughout the years I have invested in numerous wigs and hairpieces in a variety of colors, and it has always been fun. I was greeted by a fairly close acquaintance once at a large dinner party while I was wearing a very cute wig, and she asked to be introduced. What is true is that I am older than I look, and the hair on my head is exactly where it should be given the hard life I’ve given it.

At one time or another, I have been a blonde, had various shades of brunette, or a combination of the two, and for one luau we gave, it even became black. Later instead of actually dying it, I bought a black wig. This was after seeing the movie “Chicago” with Katherine Zeta-Jones dancing her way through killing her husband.

I was astonished to discover that the nice woman who cuts my hair, is wearing a wig! You just never know.

I always wanted to have red hair, since so many people in my family have it, but the only time mine became red was an accident. I gave myself a home perm, and instead of following directions and waiting a certain amount of time, I put some brown coloring on it. It immediately bunched up, became brilliant red, and looked exactly like a Brillo pad, or Harpo Marx in drag.

It would have been OK except that a widower friend of ours brought a new girlfriend to dinner that night to introduce us. She was a pretty and much-younger natural redhead with long flowing curls she had a habit of tossing around during dinner. Worse that that, she arrived accompanied by an unannounced Schnauzer dog, who snarled at my two dogs, a German Shepherd and a large Dobermann, who did not snarl in return. It was not a happy occasion. However, it did put the lie to the old saying that people look like their dogs because she did not look at all like a Schnauzer. And they did not marry.

So what I needed to tell you is not to believe anything your mirror or your friends tell you about your hair. If you think you are a willowy 5″8″, and blonde, then you are, and in the real scheme of things, why does it matter anyway? It’s OK to believe whatever you wish.