Golden Girl

I look like a ghost and smell like a Koala habitat with Noxzema masking my face. I am miserable. I kissed Will Walsh in the dugout and haven’t heard from him since. Meanwhile, I saw Amy Hollis and Heather Hawkins walking through the food court at the Cary Towne Center when I was coming out of the County Seat with my mother. I took a few steps back, distancing myself from mom’s fat pregnant belly as she pushed my sister in the stroller. All the cute guys from Junior High were seductively slurping their Orange Juliuses while checking out the girls I dreamed of being, with fabulously feathered hair, shirts falling off their shoulders like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance and nothing coming between them and their Calvins. When Amy and Heather dressed up as mice and sang Peaches and Herb’s Reunited at the 8th grade talent show, I knew the only thing that would have made their act better was if the duet were a trio and I’d been invited to be the third mouse.

  But here in my bedroom on a Saturday night, I am sure those mice and all the cute boys who love them are out at a party somewhere while I sit under my checkered canopy deep cleaning my pores. How can I make myself more desirable. What is the key to having fun? I am flipping through Seventeen Magazine, when the answer reveals itself, shimmering under the spotlight of my Holly Hobbie lamp. “Where the boys are!” says the caption with a picture of a good-looking man gazing adoringly at a sexy blonde. The paragraph below says “Just spray on Sun-In under the sun and see what happens. To your hair, maybe even to your life.”

  Why THAT is the logical answer. Amy and Heather are blonde. Blondes have more fun. Therefore, if I am no longer a mousy brunette, I, too, could have fun. And turn heads. And have friends. And go to parties. And be happy. Be a Peaches and Herb mouse.

  The next day I go to Kerr Drugs and buy a bottle of Super Sun In with my babysitting bucks. I don’t do a test patch. Oh no, I spray it all over my head and sit in the lawn chair in the sunniest part of our yard and wait for my metamorphosis to begin. I imagine that when I start High School in a month, I will be blonde and beautiful, and at the top of the social hierarchy alongside the quarterback, the cheerleaders, the class president and the girls with Papagallo purses.

  Day one: I shower and dry my hair. I stare this way and that in the mirror. It might be a little lighter.

  Day two: I tell my friend Giselle that I cannot go to Skatetown for the 50%-off Afternoon Skate. Yes, it would be cooler in the air-conditioned rink, but it is too dark in there. Instead, I sit in sun on a 98-degree day with 110% humidity, my hair crunchy with peroxide, lemon juice and silk amino acids. You must pay a price for beauty, I reason, and I am going to give it all I’ve got. That night, as I dry my hair, my true self begins to emerge.

  Days three and four: I am becoming a golden girl. Those High School boys are not going to know what hit them.

Thing is, the grass isn’t always greener. It’s often Astro-turf when you look up close.

A vicious cycle soon occurs. Hair grows, roots reveal themselves. Sun-in oxidation dries out hair and my once thick locks become brittle. And after a summer vacation at a dingy beach motel with a pool that is 4-parts chlorine to 1-part water, my hair turns green. When I finally get the color right, I decide what will really make me pretty is curly blonde hair, so I ask my mom if I can get a perm. She says, yes, but only if our neighbor does it.

  Mrs. Richman, who went to beauty school but has not worked in a beauty parlor for at least a dozen years, comes over with her pink terry cloth towel with the head hole, a box of coordinating pin-curl rollers, and a mixing bowl. Mom opens all the kitchen windows so the skunk and sulfur smell doesn’t make us gag.

  Years later, if you scratch-and-sniffed the goldenrod floral wallpaper in our kitchen, you’d surely have gotten whiffs of Toni Silkwave, mom’s beloved and everyone else’s hated chicken livers and onions, daddy’s Prince Albert pipe tobacco that wafted in from the back porch and the rubber cement used on countless school projects at the kitchen table.

  My perm kills whatever bouncing or behaving my Pert Shampoo promised, and I am left with yellow straw, but the boys do seem to notice me. Upper class-men ask me out. 10th grade is a miracle transformation. The girl who hid in the bathroom during slow dances in Junior High is the first on and the last to leave the High School gym dance floor after every home football game. I am proof that blondes have more fun.

  But I not only color my hair, I color my perception of what is important in life. Boys hold more value than books. A grade A in kissing is clearly more worthwhile that straight A’s on a report card. My goody two-shoes 9th grade image dissolves into a Sam Goody-obsessed, candies shoe-wearing proud-to-come-off-as-an-airhead-even-though-I-was-said-to-be-gifted-and-talented girl. The only gifts and talents I want are popularity and a boyfriend.

  Nearly 45 years have gone by since I first saw that ad that changed my life’s trajectory. We do not know what color my hair might be today had I not turned toward the sun. Perhaps, had I stayed the “dirty blonde” my hairdresser now calls the natural color at the base of my neck, I’d have taken Physics in High School and not adopted the dumb blonde persona that I consciously morphed into. I got a D in Chemistry that year and I was both gutted AND awed by my evolution. My unformed brain determined that impossibly tight jeans and irrationally yellow hair were the gateway to happiness. I think my jordache cut off some of the air supply to my brain.

  And speaking of Air Supply. Teenage me is often “Lost in Love and eager to be what you wanted.”

  I am a chameleon, changing more than just my hair for whatever boy I have my eye on. If Tom likes baseball, I become the biggest baseball fan he’s ever know, borrowing my brother’s binder of baseball cards and memorizing a handful of seemingly relevant stats.

In 1982,

I can site for you

the greatest successes of George Brett, Nolan Ryan, and Rod Carew.

  If Dan the drummer loves Rush and the Who, well, I am the biggest lover of Neil Pert and Keith Moon that he’s ever seen. The only time this pays off is when I date our eventual Valedictorian and return to getting straight A’s my senior year, which is likely how I demonstrated potential on my transcript and got into a good college.

Sun-In became the gateway drug to tanning beds, press-on nails and Dexatrim. The quest for a more perfect blonde and thereby a more perfect life leaves me with questions. If I had said no to beauty pressures, embraced my brownish brainiac, would I have mastered quantum physics and become more inquisitive and less insecure? Would I have a Nobel Prize by now?

But then again, would I have had as much fun?

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As told at Story Salon on July 18, 2024 when the theme was "What I wish I had said."