Being Blonde

A blonde joke came in my E-mail today, and it made me chuckle. They usually do, because they ARE funny, even if also insulting, like Polish jokes. For once it wasn’t the usual fare illustrating how obviously brainless blondes are to the non-blonde world. This time the blonde got the last laugh, and my thought as I finished reading was, “Revenge!”

Being blonde, or more correctly stated “having hair the color of blonde,” is quite an experience and not for the squeamish. I can speak with some authority on this, having been blonde now for about 15 years and in some degrees of blondeness for several years before that, so let me say that if you’ve never been, you have no idea what it’s like.

People have asked why I did it, and there were several things that influenced me. My favorite aunt Barbara was a blonde as long as I can remember, and she was a beautiful woman with good taste and class. I suppose part of me wanted to emulate her. Since I was not a redhead like my Dad and younger sister, I favored having a bit of blonde in my light brown hair to perk it up. It began with sun streaks (remember Sun In?), progressed to highlighting, then to frosting, and finally to going all the way. I might not have done it, except that the bleach used to frost my hair turned it into lifeless straw—and then there was that “going gray” thing. My hairdresser Garry assured me that he could use a much gentler bleach on my whole head than he did with the frosting, so I thought, “Why not?” After all, I could always retreat to brown hair again.

That first bleach job was an experience I won’t forget. It took all day, and try as he might, Garry could not get the color to stay in my hair. I finally ended up going home with a bright brassy do, a can of spray tint, and his promise to contact the company to see what to do about this problem. I was not happy at all with how it turned out, and for the first time in my life, I cried over my hair. Thank God Garry called me the next day and arranged an appointment to fix it, because I was heartbroken with how it had gone.

I should tell you that I was not one to dye my hair all shades of the rainbow when I was younger. I never especially disliked my hair color, and it was not a nondescript mousy brown. About all I had done before this blonde progression was use a little blonde rinse on my hair. I had the skin coloring to go red if I’d desired, but I never wanted to be a redhead, nor had I wished to be a brunette like my Mom. No way!

So Garry fixed my hair, and I’ve been platinum blonde ever since. I loved the color, as did Sam my husband, but I was totally unprepared for the reactions I got from men I’d known for years as well as from complete strangers. To be honest, it scared me to death to have men I worked next to suddenly freak out and say things such as, “Wow Dianne, you are totally hot!” Excuse me? Nothing had changed but the hair! The clothes were the same. The make-up and perfume were the same. As far as I could tell, I acted the same, so why all the commotion? Then there were the total strangers who would come up and start conversations out of the blue while I was minding my own business. The world was turned on its head, and suddenly there was no place to hide. I mean, I couldn’t push a shopping cart through Safeway without having at least one stranger ask me how to select vegetables or go to a celebration at work without being engaged in conversation by a man I didn’t know. I guess if I’d been looking for someone, it might have been great, but I wasn’t and it was not. I seriously considered going back to my old color, but I didn’t want to—I loved the new one, so I had to learn how to steer my way through the mine field that had unexpectedly opened in front of me.

Blonde jokes never used to bother me, because (after all) I was not REALLY blonde. As the years went by though, it hit me that most of the people I know think of me as a blonde, and most of them even think I’m a natural one. It wasn’t bad as long as “blonde” was equated with sexy, appealing, and attractive; but when it meant dumb and brainless, I didn’t like it! Phrases such as “having a blonde moment” are common now, and the meaning is not that the person suddenly blossomed into attractiveness. No, it’s meant to say that the person had a moment of unexplainable stupidity.

On the other hand, people have said all sorts of things about me as a blonde that I never heard with brown hair. I’ve been compared to angels and queens of cinema—believe me, that never happened to my brown-haired self! People even think you’re sexy when you’re fat—take Mae West as an example. I tell you, people (men and women alike) say and do all sorts of things they would never dream of if you had any other shade of hair, and they make assumptions that aren’t always warranted. Well, let me just say in parting, I’m the same old me that I was before and will be for many more years, God willing.