Blond: Qu'est-ce que c'est?

It shouldn't matter but...

A few weeks ago I was in a public dressing room, which was also a bathroom, getting changed into my street clothes after a dance class. There was only one other person in the room with me (not from the class) but she was a big person with a lot of stuff and was thus taking up the whole mirror and the one bench on which to put your stuff. When I put my purse and tote bag of wadded garments in the one available spot on the bench—which happened to be right by the mirror—she didn’t push them away, but she didn’t politely make room either; she was plainly distressed that I had gotten between her and the mirror. For a good minute it was awkward as hell and maybe she sounds awful but actually I understood: she had almost put her look together and was trying to get the details exactly right, and she was radiating a powerful need for simultaneous big-picture scope and tiny-detail exactitude. And so I picked up my stuff and said to her “I think you are in the middle of an intense aesthetic moment and that needs space.” She looked at me with an unreadable expression and said “Is that a good thing?” I replied “Yes! Sometimes it’s an important thing.” And went into a stall to change.

She wasn’t blond. But still, its related.

Tressie McMillan Cottom

A few months ago I read a piece in the NY Times by Tressie McMillan Cottom about blond mystique; it tickled me in a couple of different ways that lingered so that I finally decided to write about it. Actually, I started writing about it some months back but it kept getting pushed off to the side for various reasons and then I thought it was too late. But actually, if the subject of adornment and its meanings is sometimes an important thing, it is also a timeless thing.