Playground Style

Lifestyle & Culture | August 4, 2009

What I have found is woman get stuck in a look, style of clothes, hair or makeup from a time period in their life when they felt good about themselves. Not all woman do this, but many do, they find their era and stay. This ages the daylights out of you faster than smoking, the sun and drinking cheap booze. One look and you are transported back to a forgotten time, and there is a reason we call it that. We need to let go. It is one thing to have a signature style but even those are influenced by how you change over decades. I am a creature who likes change I am on the other end of that pendulum swing of the stuck folks. I morph and change with time including my clothes, hair style and color, and I do this in sometimes unflattering and frankly embarrassing ways. That is the downside of refreshing your look over time with reckless abandon.

Taming the feminine wiles has always been difficult for me. Some things about being female I enjoy and have done well at like make-up or rather eye shadow. The whole face production has been a learning process over the years as the terrain changes. I always have been a girl who tilted toward neutral shadows even in the 70’s and the 80’s when ice blue and high drama was all the rage. I found being confronted by a frosty glitter blue gaze to be unsettling in a Barbie meets android way. So I chose not to inflict it on others. My high drama comes in the form of hair; my once blonde tresses were not as big as the Jersey Girls but pretty damn good for a Long Island chicklette armed with Aqua Net. High school was the beginning of Farrah and wings which my honey hued locks worked well with. Then I kicked it up a notch moving into streaky blonde hot rollered hair sprayed into a mane, no wall of bangs though. I left those to the others from the bridge and tunnel crowd. Then came my softer curls with a bandana or do-rag, yes Virginia just like Bananarama. There was even a bad Peter Frampton mall perm which thankfully there are only one or two pictures of. When I came home with that bush I stood in the shower crying combing White Rain cream rinse though till I was pruney. My brother in law said the only nice thing about that look, “With all that hair you don’t have such a pea head anymore” a charming man to this day. I even had a spiky new wave not quite Flock of Seagulls action in the late 80’s when I worked in a recording studio in Manhattan. It was almost a requirement to go with my all black wardrobe. My success was always spotty when it came to hair some of these things looked good, others were frightful. I just moved through each with a sense of adventure, fun and impermanence.

Just looking at the array of hair styles above from the 70’s and 80’s you can see I enjoy the act of reinventing myself. The hard part over the years has been finding a good stylist. I have lived in 5 states over the last 15 years and the two key ingredients to success for me in the move are finding an honest and competent mechanic and a talented hairdresser. I like change but have no clue on what would look good on me. I need someone who can assess me, my lack of skill with a round brush and blow dryer then adapt. Oh yea I only have 4 hairs on my head so the cut and perfect product to simulate hair is essential. In the old days that was a rat tailed comb, hair spray or a perm. Thank god for science! My sister Chris only has 3 hairs on her head. I never knew till I went to adjust her necklace while she was driving. My hand kept moving through the line of where her hair was yet I could not feel it. It was not solid; it was some kind of spectacular Vegas mirage. Now that is good hair. Working with a hair stylist who listens and knows you is more important than choosing the right underwear for white pants. That kind of stylist is difficult to find. Making a poor choice is near terminal, not just for you hair but the extraction. Any woman knows it is much harder, near impossible to break up with a hairdresser than a boyfriend. I told my ex this once and he laughed his ass off, what does a man who has his own Flowbee barbering kit know? Women stay with stylists for years because we don’t know how or want to imagine the drama of breaking it off. God forbid we want to see someone in the same shop. Divorce can be less complicated than a feat such as this. I guess it can add another layer to how woman get stuck.

Given the choice over the years to move or stay, I move, except when it comes to exercise. I jump states, jobs, hair color and style easily; all of these things are mutable. What is a constant, something I depend on over time is me. My sense of humor, ability to right myself in a difficult situation, my bad timing and good luck are things that don’t change. The external package is a playground; the internal landscape is my currency. So even though there are a slew of bad photo’s littered about I am ok with that. It could be I am more of a “beg for forgiveness” person rather than “ask for permission”. I don’t wait for all the data to be in, I don’t think it ever is. I take a censes and jump in thinking “what’s the worst that can happen?” To do nothing is a choice, just one I rarely pick. There are times in a whirl of emotion, a fragile moment I do choose to do nothing, it’s just never happens while I’m sitting with a wet head in a rubber purple smock is all I’m saying.