Pale and Cool

My junior high school years, or what is now referred to as middle school, were the worst years of my life. It was the late ‘70s and blue eye shadow and Farrah Fawcett hair were all the rage. I wasn’t allowed to wear make-up back then, and my hair looked nothing like the pin-up queen’s: it was dirty dishwater blonde and frizzy and it looked more like the hair sported by the character Cameron Diaz played in the movie Being John Malkovich. Nevertheless, I tried my best to fashion it in as stylish a manner as I could, and experimented with every methodology I could muster to tame the unruly, bushy mane. I tried sleeping with large prickly rollers atop my head; I attempted flattening it with rows and rows of bobby pins; I sat under an enormous hair dryer with my locks stretched tight over giant soup cans. One night, in utter desperation, I even tried ironing it. With a real iron. But nothing worked for more than an hour or so; the moment I left the house, my hair returned to its natural unfettered state. When I finally gave up and cut it short, I still tried to feather out the bangs. But because I had a funny cowlick on the right side of my head, my bangs would only properly feather on the left side. The right side always resulted in one gigantic hair wave protruding out of my forehead. Although I loathed the way that side looked, I was mesmerized by the perfectly feathered hair on the left. That was the side of me I could show off! Who cared that one half of my head looked like a ski slope? The other side was like Farrah’s! That side of me was cool.

I longed to fit in back then; I wished I were popular and pretty and thin. Instead, I was awkward and chubby and invisible. I toyed with the idea of trying out for the cheerleading team in an effort to be one of the “it girls,” but inasmuch as I fantasized about having a boyfriend on the football team and being invited to the post-game parties, I knew that I could never bring myself to even attempt doing the necessary cartwheels and backbends.

Instead, I joined the Math Club and the Glee Club and the Honor Society. For a while I was even in the Marching Band, but dropped out when the practices interfered with my tenure working on the school magazine. I loaded up my days with every extracurricular endeavor I could fit in. I loved what I was doing, but I hated that I was still shunned by the cool kids and the athletes and the in-crowd.

Late one afternoon, I stayed after school to help the drama club design costumes for an upcoming play. It was a production about the Revolutionary War and we were making wigs out of paper bags. After hours of cutting and pasting, we became a bit punchy and decided to try on the wigs. We knew how ridiculous we looked, but somehow we didn’t care; we ALL looked ridiculous together. We started posing and parading through the empty school, our laughter echoing in the shadowy hallways, the camaraderie palpable. I’ll never forget my feeling of exhilaration as we started running through library and the lunchroom, the art department and the auditorium. I don’t really know what had come over us or why we were running, but in that instant I felt a part of something bigger than myself and I felt happy. Finally we made our way through the gymnasium, and as we cackled in the corridors, we found ourselves face to face with a busload of football players and cheerleaders returning from an away game. We froze as our laughter turned into theirs, fully directed at us in our foolish wigs, and then quietly slunk back over to our side of the school.

By the time I got to High School, I became more adept at playing the part of an aspiring insider. I snuck a bottle of red nail polish into my locker and would arrive at school, paint my nails and then remove all of the polish before going home at the end of the day I started dieting and discovered Sun-In and slowly became a real blonde. I even lathered on a popular suntan in a tube called Q-T, which I had to abandon after it turned me orange. Perhaps it was all the effort I made to get the popular kids to like me or perhaps it was my new blonde hair, but by the time I graduated I felt ever so slightly more accepted by my peers. Or perhaps I just didn’t hate myself as much, and I was simply projecting.

After I graduated and went off to college, I became friends with a bunch of lovely, wonderful, slightly loony Deadheads. They frowned upon anything that wasn’t natural; make-up and nail polish and hair color were thoroughly uncool. So I let my roots grow in, put the pounds back on and proudly portrayed my new persona. It wasn’t until I bumped into an old high school classmate on campus that I questioned my new image. Though we had known each other for years, he no longer recognized me. When I reminded him who I was, he looked stunned. He was speechless! Finally he leaned in very close and quietly told me that I was so pale and looked so different, he thought I might be sick! After that, I still kept my Deadhead friends close, but always snuck on some blush when I knew that no one would catch me.

Not much has changed all these years later: I still want to fit in and I still worry about my weight and I still agonize over my hair. But instead of wearing rollers to bed, three times a year I go to a fancy salon and spend three hours having it colored and straightened. I have finally given up my quest for coolness, in fact, I don’t even know what cool is anymore! And, at nearly 48 years old, I don’t even think it is possible to be cool anymore. Right now, more than anything else in the world, I’d much rather be considered hot.