I was a blonde teenage anti-semantic devil bunny

Happy Purim! I got you a Yak. It's Kosher don't worry.

In celebration of this, one of the most joyous and fun holidays on the Jewish calendar, (No, Purim is not a shampoo silly) and as a distraction while trying to ignore the adipocerous nature of the wanna-be Intelligistas in our nations capital, (what with their semantics, double entendres and their crossword puzzles) and after being inspired by the seeing flower buds on the trees and daffodils and crocus popping up all over town, (SPOILER ALERT: Spring has sprung) I dyed my hair today.

Monsieur Moose just brought back a fresh supply from Germany. (I think the name of the color is "Braune Fische") After applying the color, I decided to sit and wait the required hour in the Gothic powder room at Mt. Varnum. It's severely Catholic rococo decor inspired me to perform the severely Protestant "A Bed Among the Lentils", the dramatic monologue written by Alan Bennet about the dark interior life of a provincial vicar's wife, Susan, a woman let down by life and God. Her secret fondness for altar wine and a young Indian grocer with good legs and teeth relieves the tedium of days among sanctimonious parish matrons where flower arranging ranks as a competitive sport. ("One sees them so often in England, those women," she says. "You know them automatically.") mid monologue, as I waited for the color to take, I had the stark realization that I started coloring my hair when I was eight and have never stopped since. That's a lot of Clairol under the bridge.

The first time, in 1969, was totally more than a mere vanity project, I simply had decided to live my life from that time, until further notice, as a Chinese Princess. I had my Beatles mop cut into a smart bob, complete with "China Chop" bangs, and then dyed a dark blue black. (Mom is very forward thinking) This phase eventually was grown out of, after I found after about a year of living like deposed royalty, that it wasn't so easy to change my name to Mai Ling.

The next major look came about, and was really very extremely necessary, after the Lemon Juice, Sun-In, Home Perm Incident Of '74.

What hadn't burned off or fallen out of my skull on its own was buzzed off and dyed "Country Butter Blonde" in my mom's near-hysteric yet totally intrinsic effort to salvage some semblance of presentably.

Just for reference purposes: when the boy next door saw me and my raw head get out of the car, he said I looked like Billy Jean King going through chemo... if Billy Jean King had been an guy. And blonde. (Or would that be blond? hmmm, Semantics...)

Why did I bring this up? Oh, merde....the depth of my shallowness is somewhat distracting, non?

Oh. So, with my mother's beaming blessing, I pretty much bleached my hair from then on for at least three years, with increasing frequency, for several I became "blond-orexic"-- convinced that I wasn't blond enough, that I could be blonder (similar in nature to the dreaded and leathery "Tan-orexic" who layout in January, keep a bottle of baby oil in the glove box and who perennially whine, "I'm soooo pale," holding out a well-done, brittle and crispy appendage for your appraisal)-- and that unless my hair was actually TRANSLUCENT, I was a brunette. When I ran out of money, I desperately decided to do a home job (if I'm not mistaken, the color I chose from the shelf was "Albino Nuclear Holocaust Survivor Clear" by Loreal, chain-mail gloves and safety goggles not included) and I burned all my hair off again.

So I cut it all off. Again.
And DIDN'T. FUCKING. TOUCH. IT. I was sort of hoping (and shut up, everyone hopes this) that maybe I'd have this astounding and beautifully complex natural hair color.

If I asked 100 people to describe the color of my hair, a safe 75 of those people would answer "somewhere between empty toilet paper roll and Denny's waitress brown". The other 25 would be stumped, but might go with some animal; maybe a sad animal that spends all of its time blending in with boring ground cover in the woods and rolling around in the mud without a comb. That, or dirt clods. Hell, I've seen squirrels with far more dimensional color.

Long story short, tired of having people try to wrap long expanses of toilet paper around my head, one weekend I innocently used some conditioner by "Madame Bovary" that's supposed to add "subtle red highlights" and I successfully transformed myself from an "empty toilet paper roll" into My Little Pony.

A close family friend looked at me and told me I looked like Strawberry Shortcake. And then he leaned forward to smell my head. For the strawberries. He kept doing it. And every time I saw that disappointment flicker across his face as he gently squeezed my temples together and inhaled, I longed for the camouflage days of yore, when I could safely blend in with old carpets and burned things. Days when I didn't have an expectant nose pressed to my scalp and when people didn't jump on my back hoping for a free ride to the Little Pony Show Stable.

The good news is that it washed out in five to eight shampoos or something.

From that day forward I have been a regular Pantone color wheel as far as hair colors go.

When my hair was cut into a fashionable mohawk in the late seventies I sported a hot pink hue that was achieved by using industrial carpet dye with the occasional Kool-Aid refresher while I wrote poetry- poorly- about hating disco and being an anarchist, spending all of my days in ballet classes and nights in punk bars.

In the early eighties I dyed my mokawk black, leaving it unspiked, wearing it over one eye not unlike an undead Veronica Lake, and, of course, wearing clothing and nail polish with wrist bandages to match, playing keyboard -poorly- in a band called "Culturecide", while acting moody and talking incessantly about subjects ranging from the true ownership of the Elgin Marbles or the fact Beethoven spent his final years, stone deaf, writing 33 small masterpieces based upon one inferior waltz by another man to complete the ensemble.

My goth period then turned into a hybrid New-Romantic/wave look having my letting the 'hawk grow out and had deep aubergine tresses with perpetual three day stubble as an accessory- (I looked like the offspring of Boy George and George Michael) my conversations consisted of New Age blather and the the discussions of the works of Lord Byron, Gabriel Dante Rossetti and longing to live my life like Gabriele d'Annunzio.

My years of having long hair abruptly came to an end one day when I was zipping around in a little Mercedes 500 SL convertible and got my hair caught in the headrest of the car and had to call my stylist for emergency roadside assistance. (did you know that AAA doesn't have "hair style emergency" coverage? That'll teach me to read the fine print)

I have pretty much kept the color and cut the same since then, with a few excursions into bad hair cuts- one made my head look like a blueberry muffin- and changing from varied shades of rouge, the most recent was a color called "Tempted peach", I have even not colored it at all on occasion, only to find to my horror that it had turned completely white, not a sexy salt and pepper, but full on Santa white. Someone even told my that I looked like Porno Santa. (a compliment?) I have often toyed with the idea of letting it stay that way, but somehow it just doesn't look natural, which is, after all, very important to me.... *sigh* how I suffer for beauty... Oh look, cupcakes!

Cheers, or rather LeChaim, this will put hair on your chest..

The Hair Raiser
1 1/2 oz 100 proof vodka
1/2 oz Rock and Rye® liqueur
1 tbsp lemon juice
Shake all ingredients with ice, strain into a cocktail glass, and serve.