Once, Teresa and I decided to get up-dos for New Years Eve. I won't tell you where, but it was not a good call.
My hairdo took more than two hours to create, made me look unhinged and a hundred years old, and cost a ridiculous amount of money. My hair was pulled tightly back, as if racing away from my
forehead like deer from a forest fire, and secured with weird little
pearls that looked like Frankenstein rivets; behind that, hard, tight, shiny
little sausage curls tumbled, Jonbenet style. This was sprayed with so much
hairspray that when I touched a curl, I mistook it for a plastic comb, asking
Teresa, "When did they put THIS in?"
Teresa's hairdo took less than twenty minutes to create, made her look seventy years old and neurotic, and cost a similarly ridiculous amount of money. Her hair was a scrubby mess of loose, languid frizz
surrounding a strange lump in the shape of a chrysalis or root vegetable on the
back of her head. It looked like a big dust bunny or a matted rat's
nest.
Oh, and it wasn't just hair; we got our make-up done directly afterward. Teresa's wasn't bad, but I had mine
done by an older lady who aptly sized me up as hideous and decided
I deserved bright orange lipstick and a thick coating of pale foundation and
powder which cracked and added wrinkles that weren't even there. It was Bob
Hope Kabuki make-up. I remember my ancient, worried eyes staring back from the
rear-view mirror on the way home as I tried to figure out if it was as awful as
I thought it was.
It was. We started to laugh, and decided we had to share our
new looks.
Giggling, Teresa and I went to show Mom, acting like we were
totally okay with the hairstyles. We saw her look up happily, register how
awful the hair was, and then realize she had to conceal her look of shock. We
could tell she was trying really hard not to laugh, and we finally let her off
the hook by laughing ourselves, at which point she howled, hanging onto the sink. She asked why Teresa had a rutabaga on her head, and why
they had driven rivets into my skull.
Teresa adds to this narrative, “Needful to say, we then
showered and scrubbed away the awful makeup and styling products, and did our
own hair and makeup for New Year's Eve. I WISH we were unselfish enough to go
out in our scary looks, spreading mirth as a public service, but vanity
triumphed. By the time we hit the parties, we looked rather fetching, and not
so much old, insane, and bizarre.”
As I recall, I did not look fetching - my hair was rendered lifeless by the many washings needed to get the spray out, and I ran out of
time to get artful with my makeup. But as it turned out, looking great was not the thing that brought me joy that night, or in the many times since then that I have remembered that New Year's Eve.
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