Amen.
I was out at the Town Talk with a friend a few weeks ago, and as we were both leaving, I realized there was a Rainbow Foods right across the street, and I needed deodorant and toilet paper. Since (in the parlance of social media) I also consider my friends ”activity partners,” I asked my friend if she’d like to come with me to buy deodorant and toilet paper. “Of course,” she said.
While we were in the deodorant and toilet paper aisle, my friend — a brunette in her 30s — remembered suddenly she needed hair dye, which is in the same aisle. I was very surprised to learn that she dyed her hair. “Of course,” she said.
“It’s almost fifty percent gray,” she explained. “Look, you can see it at the roots.” She bent over, and sure enough, half of the bottom sixteenth-of-an-inch of her dark hair was in fact gray. It was stunning. I almost fell over backwards.
“Are you kidding?” I shouted incredulously. “You’re dyeing that out? It looks tremendous.” I explained that I have always found women over thirty-five sporting shoulder-length or longer bunches of half-gray salt-and-pepper hair to look absolutely amazing.
It was now my friend’s turn for incredulity. She disagreed strenuously — the gray looks old, stodgy, corporate. True sometimes, I explained, but I said I wasn’t talking about those short corporate-looking Kathleen Sibelius-style things. I was talking about Susan Sontag and Patti Smith and Georgia O’Keeffe! Defiant as middle age approaches, but with dignity and poise! Walking into a crowded cafe with giant sunglasses and a notebook and a full floppy head of salt-and-pepper spilling all over! Watching the stupid 26 year old boys reflexively look up from their inane college-age girlfriends and mouthing, in awe, what if…?
This isn’t even that dumb-ass Cougartown bullshit — this is something much more profoundly exciting and earthy. “I am a woman, and you had better believe that I am old enough to have hung out with Glenn Branca, but I understand poetry in a way that you do not, and I can still buy better marijuana than you and could actually smoke you under the table but I don’t have to prove anything and don’t have time for that sort of juvenile nonsense anyway because I am too busy writing an essay for Film Comment.” Oh my God! Yes, please!
My friend wasn’t totally sold. So I sent her the images above as proof. Gaze in awe. Are you dyeing or plucking those grays away, reader? Reconsider. Because look again at these three women, and consider that there is a good chance they could be you.
