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Wednesday, July 14, 1999 By Samantha Bennett
Journalists are tough. We get paid to ask the tough questions, chase the tough stories, ransack the tough sock drawers. We're dogged, smart and boy, are we sharp-eyed. And of course, it goes without saying, we are never wrong. So when you work with journalists, nothing goes unnoticed.
"You limping?" someone will demand as you blister in your new shoes. "That your mom on the phone again?" "Boxers or briefs?" Nope, there's nothing a journalist won't sniff out.
Except if you get drunk and dye your hair orange with Kool-Aid.
Well, I didn't actually dye it. My friend Cat did. What are friends for?
Cat and I celebrated the nation's birthday by speeding off to a house in the country and lounging about in the yard playing board games and drinking. We polished off the beers by nightfall and came inside to watch TV and overeat.
She had knocked off drinking hours before because she was going to drive us back to town later. But she mixed me several rum-based beverages that could have been used to euthanize horses. In casting about for mixers, she jokingly held up a couple of packets of Kool-Aid.
"Oh!" I said, remembering an article I had seen somewhere. "We can dye our hair! It's all the rage in L.A., or wherever the rages are before they get here."
No grass growing under Cat's trendy dogs. She'd already done it. And somehow that made her eager to do it to me.
"What flavor/color do you want?" she asked. "Red? Blue? Pink? Orange?" I hadn't been serious, but she was. I couldn't do it. I had to go to work in the morning. What would people say?
"Orange," I answered.
This is what girls do if you leave them unsupervised for a few hours.
Like any pro colorist, she initiated a detailed discussion about my expectations ("I will regret this almost immediately") and the advisability of various shadings of red tones. She found plastic gloves and towels and carefully mixed a superconcentrated, sugarless solution. She tucked a towel around my collar to protect my shirt. Then she put my head over the garbage disposal and started pouring.
"Close your eyes!" And that is to protect whom, I wonder.
She was nothing if not thorough, and I was overcoming my doubts and actually admiring Cat's professionalism as she deftly tied a plastic bag over my sodden hair and allowed me to stand up.
I looked at her. She looked at me. She dissolved in shrieks of laughter.
"What?" I said. "You've never seen anyone with a bag on her head? What?"
She caught her breath with difficulty. "Did you ever see that movie 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory'?"
"Yes." Uh-oh.
"Do you remember the Oompa-Loompas?" She was almost choking with mirth. I considered helping her.
"The little guys with the orange faces." She nodded helplessly. If you are wise, you'll not let someone pour Kool-Aid on your head. Another life lesson learned the hard way.
A good 10 minutes of face-scrubbing later, we settled down for a game of '80s Trivial Pursuit while a pool of liquid collected in the bag tied on my head.
Intermittently, Cat would pull out a lock of hair and inspect it, just exactly as if she had some idea what she was doing, and then tuck it back in to marinate some more. By that time, the rum had anesthetized me enough to render me both trusting and fatalistic, a very dangerous condition. That is precisely how people end up nude and abandoned in another state, or married.
Finally, we went back to the sink. The bag came off. My hair was thoroughly shampooed, then dried.
I looked great.
I went to work the next day a fabulous warm strawberry blond -- and no one even noticed! No one said a word! Ah well. But it just goes to show that if you trust a friend who has had a lot less to drink than you have, you might be pleasantly surprised.
You will live in happiness too,
Like the Oompa-Loompa doompity-do!
antha Bennett can be reached by e-mail at
sbennett@post-gazette.com
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