The New Rules for Blondes

by Coppock, Selena

  And so began a long and painfully boring day during which I was trapped alone in a stairwell and small lobby area for six hours. It was even more of a mind-numbing time suck than R. Kelly’s song “Trapped in the Closet” (though with a bit more leg room, I suppose). It was just me, the pudgy and brown-haired fish out of water; a washer and dryer tucked beneath the stairwell like a robot Harry Potter; and hours of solitude staring me in the face. To make matters worse, the lobby area where I was confined was absolutely freezing because Britain doesn’t believe in heating buildings, so my hours of boredom were punctuated by the chattering of my (straight white American) teeth. I wasn’t prepared for a full day exposed to the elements—I was dressed in ratty sweatpants, socks, and a crummy T-shirt from my college improv comedy troupe, Yodapez.49 Every year my troupe would receive a generous grant from the college and what money we didn’t spend on strange comedy props like tricycles, kiddie pools filled with ketchup, and matching unitards for all members, we’d spend on troupe T-shirts—the weirder, the better. That year, we had designed T-shirts with photos of frightening-looking criminals that we’d pulled off the Internet, from FacesOfMeth.us. Each T-shirt was emblazoned with pictures of these weirdos positioned in Brady Bunch–like tiled format, with one team member’s name below each photo. From above “Selena” stared out an emaciated vagrant woman with no teeth and a cigarette dangling out of her mouth. The best part? The T-shirts were the color of urine. Well, urine if you are a mildly dehydrated human.

  My full day of forced isolation made me feel like Tom Hanks in Cast Away, only without the tropical temperatures, tan, and volleyball companion. All I had for “entertainment” were the local real estate catalogs that cluttered the mail area. That day, I read every single one cover to cover and gained a better appreciation of the insane prices of real estate in the Kensington neighborhood of London. I guess the royalties from such hits as “Rock DJ” and “Millennium” were treating Brit pop god Robbie Williams pretty well, as he lived in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, an appreciation of overpriced flats doesn’t keep you warm when you’re locked out of your apartment and stuck in an unheated stairwell for a full day.

  I had so much time to myself that I unknowingly entered into stage three of the Kübler-Ross grief model: bargaining. You’re probably not supposed to pray for a different hair color, but I needed to put this problem in the capable hands of a higher power. Please, God, make me wake up a blonde. Just take me back to where I was before I became hell-bent on being a brunette. Please—let me just wake up blonde tomorrow. I’ll never complain about missing the Tube ever again. I’ll stop making fun of the odd characters who live in this building. I’ll even stop visiting that pub down the street most nights of the week—I’ll get it together. Just please, PLEASE, God, let me wake up and open my eyes a centimeter and see a head of yellow, brassy hair.

  After hours of solitary confinement, I finally heard the sweet sounds of help—a key in the front door. Yes! Freedom! Whoever is there will help me, I thought. At least I can go sit in an apartment and warm up a bit, maybe have some food, and wait for Mary Beth to come home and unlock our flat.

  The door opened a crack and a normal-size head peeked through, followed by an emaciated skeleton body. Fucking Lollipop Guild. Of all the building residents who could come home right now, it has to be her. Dammit! I thought. I huddled in the chilly stairwell as she entered, and I was painfully aware of how disgusting I looked in my urine-colored T-shirt and ratty sweatpants. Plus, I had brown hair, which made me look exhausted and brunette at all times.

  “Hey,” Lollipop Guild said flatly as she walked by me to go open her front door.

  “Oh my goodness, I’m so glad you’re home!” I said as I thought to myself, Why the hell am I acting like she’s friendly or we’re friends at all? She’s a jerk, and you’re punchy from having no human contact for too many hours. Stop being so needy, Coppock!

  “Get this—I locked myself out of my apartment this morning! About six hours ago! I’ve been trapped in this friggin’ freezing stairwell all day!” I rambled on, while thinking, Selena—please stop saying “friggin’ ” in front of people, OK? We aren’t at a Celtics game with Sully and Quinny.

  Lollipop Guild swiveled her giant dome until she was looking directly at me, her highlights glittering in the hallway lamplight. The blonde streaks taunted me, as if to say, Selena, you should have followed the advice of your mom’s colorist, John, and eased into brunette life. You could have gone for light-brown hair with blonde highlights, and you probably wouldn’t be in this lockout mess in the first place. Bad things come to those who go too dark brown, as the old saying goes. She looked at me blankly.

  “Huh. Where’s Mary Beth?” The monotone of her voice revealed her indifference to my plight. Her affect was so flat and unsympathetic that Lollipop Guild seemed like a bad actor just phoning it in on a sitcom that she’s ashamed to have been cast in but she needs the paycheck. I’m painfully aware of my proclivity for spazz-like behavior and more than one ex-boyfriend has said that I am “too much,” but Lollipop Guild was a bad actor in her own life. As if the stakes were never high because there were never any stakes. As if every interaction in her life was as unimportant as, say, choosing vanilla or chocolate ice cream if you enjoy both equally. Lollipop Guild was simply a skeletal body with zero emotion.

  Lollipop Guild looked me up and down and her eyes lingered on the photo of “Selena” (the filthy, smoking, vagrant version on my pale-yellow T-shirt) while I silently cursed myself for wearing such goofy shirts to bed. Desperate for a warm place to sit, I barreled forward in my pleas for help.

  “Mary Beth is in class all day. I had a whole day planned—walking around, getting some coffee, exploring . . .” I yammered on, while thinking, Again, Selena, all of this is too much information—Lollipop Guild doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the adventures you had planned for the day! Her idea of a great free day would be spent sucking on ice cubes, working out in a raincoat, and staring at a map of her beloved Golden State.

  “But I got locked out of my apartment . . . and locked into this stairwell, so I’ve been stuck in here all day. . . . It’s like I’m in a weird carpeted jail . . . that’s just small jail areas on multiple floors . . . and the clothes are better than orange prison jumpsuits, I suppose . . . and we have nice windows . . . and I’m not stuck with anybody else here . . . no other prisoners . . . except for my own thoughts and boredom.” Good God, Selena!

  Lollipop Guild stared at me blankly, whispered “Whoa . . . sucks,” then walked into her apartment and shut the door. As her door slammed, stage four washed over me: depression. Why does nothing go my way? I thought. I’ll be stuck with unflattering hair and trapped in this stairwell for the rest of my life. There’s no way out. I’ll never leave the entryway of this Brit building. My college pals will graduate from Hamilton College without me, get married, have kids, and I’ll still be here reading real estate catalogs. The London police department will find my corpse here when I’m ninety. I’ll still be in this weird college improv troupe T-shirt. I’ll have a head of horrible roots. I won’t even be able to play it off like I’m doing an ombré look, those roots will be so bad.

  I had come on too strong with Lollipop Guild, and apparently great highlights do not a kind soul make. I felt like a tween boy who had just asked a girl way out of his league to be his date for the big school dance, only to be given the Heisman hard and fast. Like a good boxer or a bad glutton for punishment, I wasn’t down for long, though. Within minutes, I saw another figure approaching the door and was elated. I’d take what I had learned in that Lollipop Guild interaction and apply it here. Be cool, Coppock, I thought.

  This time it was Angela from the overcrowded bunkhouse that was the second-floor apartment. Five girls crammed into a tiny apartment (bunk beds and all), and they seemed to resent Mary Beth and me because our apartment was so spacious. I wanted to explain to them, “We didn’t set up the room assignments, ya cunts. Just give me a chance�
�I’m fucking nice!”

  As I anxiously watched Angela pull her key from the front-door lock and begin walking into the lobby, I thought back to my sole interaction with her. It was during our first few weeks in London, and all of the students living in the building were gathered in the first-floor apartment (home to Lollipop Guild and the Prudish Twosome50) for a party. Mary Beth and I had brought along a few cans of Strongbow because (1) our parents raised us well, teaching us that you don’t ever visit the home of a friend and arrive empty-handed51 and (2) we imagined that their idea of “enough alcohol for a party” was definitely not enough alcohol for a party, so we had to bring provisions.

  After the standard initial pleasantries and greetings, Mary Beth and I found ourselves chatting with a few of the second-floor ladies, who already seemed to hate us for our dumb luck on the apartment front. Like a standup comedian doing “road material” (so called because it can be done anywhere for any audience, usually on the road), I initiated conversation about the astronomical cost of living in London. We can all agree that airplane food is bad, men and women are different, and living in London is pricey. Perfect! Let’s commiserate, second-floor ladies who resent me for my sick apartment.

  “Oh my goodness, it’s ridiculous,” Mary Beth agreed. “My college back in the U.S. is in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, so I guess I just got used to the prices and rent around there, ya know?”

  “Yeah! Cigarettes in upstate New York are about five dollars right now, but here in London I have to spend five pounds on my Marlboro Lights, and that’s about seven fifty!” I chimed in.

  “And the price of going out at night! You don’t have to pay a cover to get into a pub, but the more lively bars and dance clubs all have cover charges, then once you’re in there, the drinks are so pricey, too!” Mary Beth contributed.

  “Yeah, well, that’s why we really don’t go out very much,” said Angela from the second-floor apartment. “I mean, I’d rather wear my money than drink my money,” she snapped and gave us a smug smile.

  Mary Beth and I looked at her strangely while the wheels were spinning in my head and I thought, Yeah, well, I’d rather experience London and explore neighborhoods and enjoy the nightlife than spend money on flimsy, poorly made clothes from Topshop that I’ll inevitably outgrow and get sick of. Also, what was with that icy one-liner? Had we unknowingly offended her by enjoying London nightlife and dating guys who wore leather pants? We were just going with the flow of la vida London!

  Back in the freezing stairwell, I was desperate and ready to say whatever I had to say to get into a warm apartment. So what if Angela had sad hair and self-righteous logic, and was letting her London experience pass her by—I was locked out of my apartment and freezing. Time to turn on the charm.

  “Hey, Angela,” I said as she looked over the assortment of catalogs and envelopes cluttered on the mail table.

  “Hi, Selena—how are you?” she asked.

  OK, this is good, I thought. We’re engaging in conversation. She doesn’t think I’m a total asshole, it seems. Maybe just a bit of a party girl but not an asshole. Let’s just stay calm and not compare this lobby to a carpeted jail or say the word “friggin’,” OK?

  “Oh man, not so great. I got locked out of my apartment this morning—”

  “This morning! It’s five p.m. now!” she exclaimed.

  “I know! Brutal, huh?” I said, elated that Angela possessed emotions and a willingness to empathize with others, unlike Lollipop Guild. “I’m such a moron—I came down here to put money in the dryer, and I managed to totally lock myself out of my apartment! Mary Beth’s in class all day, and I’ve been stuck here freezing in these scrubby clothes,” I said, hoping that my acknowledgment of how gross I looked would prevent her from hating me for wearing a T-shirt whose premise was “ugly people = comedy gold.”

  Just then, the magic words rolled off her Topshop-shopping tongue: “Do you want to come sit in my apartment until Mary Beth gets back?”

  “Oh my goodness, would you mind!? That would be fantastic!” I tried to stop myself from appearing too excited.

  We went up to her apartment, where I warmed up and ate some McVitie’s cookies. The second-floor bunkhouse looked just like Mary Beth’s and my apartment upstairs, just with more bodies per square foot. Their apartment was carpeted with the same indestructible dark-gray carpet as ours was. Their walls were almost blindingly plain white, and the living room had only a few pieces of dorm furniture that were so dinky and insubstantial that they felt like children’s furniture.

  Angela took her personal mantra of “I’d rather wear my money than drink my money” quite seriously, as her tiny bedroom was filled with clothes from Topshop, Selfridges, and H&M. Everything was bland and made of synthetic material, not surprisingly. She was perfectly nice, and I began to feel a sense of guilt that perhaps I had prejudged this random girl from the floor below. Her system was to shop instead of party—that’s fine. She made an offhand, smarmy remark once, but she probably meant nothing by it and she just saved me from going insane in the lobby. Who knows how long I would have been stuck there if she hadn’t appeared? Lollipop Guild hadn’t been willing to help, but Angela had been and her kindness was touching and inspiring. The gratitude I felt toward Angela led me to stage five: acceptance. An odd calm came over me and I reveled in the fact that I was a brunette for a little while. What a kick! What a different, interesting experience.

  About an hour later, Mary Beth arrived home, and after I told her the tale of my lockout, I went into my bedroom to look at some photos of me with dark hair. I didn’t look half bad, I thought. It looked very unfamiliar to me, but that didn’t make it bad. I just wasn’t used to seeing myself with brown hair—it was a shock to the system. But I needed to accept it. I hadn’t missed the Tube because of my brown hair. I had brown hair and I lived in London—people do it all the time! To quote Dr. Phil,52 I needed to get real with myself: I missed being blonde, and I was being a whiny brat about it. To quote another one of Dr. Phil’s myriad mantras: I had to name it to claim it. I just wanted to be blonde. Having dark-brown hair was a fun experience, but perhaps I should have just experimented with a wig. I knew what I needed to do: I needed to quit brunette life. We’d had a good run, but blonde hair is in my veins (not literally, but you know what I mean). I needed to get back to feeling like me. The lessons of my time on the dark side weren’t lost on me, though.

  In my time spent walking down the boulevard of brunette dreams, I developed a great respect for bombshells such as Jane Russell, Cindy Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Penelope Cruz, and Ava Gardner. These women ooze(d) sex appeal without utilizing a drop of peroxide, and for that I was (and still am) in awe of them. Unfortunately, despite Cameron Diaz’s inspiration, I just couldn’t find a comfortable spot to lay my head in the brunette community. I rued the day that I bullied John the family colorist into making me almost raven-haired. But what was I to do? Hit up the British pharmacy Boots the Chemist and see if they had hair dye? Could I handle this dye job at home? What if I tried to go back to blonde but ended up orangey, like Brenda Walsh in that episode of 9021053 where she dyes at home, then is forced to wear a Blossom-style hat to West Beverly High!? I’ll take Dylan McKay as a boyfriend, but orange hair would be even worse than brown, I feared. What if I thought I was buying hair dye but it turned out to be something else, like the time when Mary Beth and I went shopping for pants (as in, clothing covering your crotch, ass, and legs that Lady Gaga rarely wears) and specifically asked a clerk for “tight pants,” only to learn that in Britain, “pants” is what you call underwear. Tight pants! We’d unknowingly been seeking snug undies!

  Mary Beth had endured enough of my brunette bitching and finally marched me to Boots, where we bought two highlighting kits. Yes, Mary Beth decided to jump on the blonde-highlight bandwagon, too! We could only find kits that were the draconian pull-through cap system for at-home highlighting, but it would have to do. Thankfully, MB and I worked as a team, with her
jabbing a metal hook into my scalp and pulling hair out through the plastic cap for me, and vice versa. Within the hour, I was a brunette with lots of blonde streaks, which, in some blonde-starved countries, passes for blonde.

  My time as a brown-haired lady was brief—just six months. Yes, I managed to pass through the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief in only six months. Like an embedded reporter who experiences life in the trenches, I have fought the battle of brunette life and lived to tell the tale. I have war stories, London photos in which I’m barely recognizable, and a closet full of jewel-tone tops to show for it. I encourage you to experience life on the dark side firsthand, as a personal challenge to test out a new look, a tool to engender sympathy and understanding for your fellow woman, and a gutsy endeavor to prove your own strength to yourself (like people who do triathlons). Sure, adopting a head of dark hair is a tough task for the true blonde, but one must endure winter to experience the spring. Peering at the world through brunette-colored glasses will make you appreciate the attention, levity, and energy of life as a blonde. And if nothing else, brown hair is a good foundation on which to layer gorgeous caramel highlights.

  PART THREE

  Blonde Behavior

  CHAPTER 11

  RULE: Keep It Classy

  Earlier we discussed the brassy-vs.-ashy phenomenon. If you aspire to be an ashy blonde, Grace Kelly, ice queen type, then you’d better review your Emily Post etiquette book because women like that wouldn’t be caught dead using the wrong fork. Grace Kelly and other cool, withholding blondes all have one thing in common (other than their use of purple shampoo): class. Your class is revealed to the world through your clothing, behavior, activities, and disposition. In Europe, where the classes are extremely stratified, manners and etiquette are hugely consequential. In the United States, the American dream is built on the concept of class ascension. As Americans, we believe that anyone can move classes and quite easily marry up or marry down. It’s not just for socialites anymore! As a by-product of that, manners and etiquette are given less weight in the United States. This difference between Europe and the United States means that Americans traveling in Europe can easily offend or horrify Europeans by lacking manners and being ignorant of etiquette. And as my mother says about etiquette gaffes, “There’s really no recovery from that. You are expected to know how to behave—especially in Europe.”