FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-0-06-213181-2
EPUB Edition MAY 2013 ISBN 9780062131829
13 14 15 16 17 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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1 I also take my chances and don’t mind working without a net, just like MCC.
2 Ford F-150s preferred, Chevy and Dodge trucks accepted.
3 Could I get a hug from Bela Karolyi, please?
4 I just wish I had had the Guns N’ Roses Appetite for Destruction album blaring in my ears, as I usually do when I run. There’s no better way to start a workout than with Axl Rose screaming a siren imitation into your eardrums.
5 So instead, my father bought a Buick Roadmaster—a mammoth station wagon we nicknamed “the Land Yacht” and that he covered in layers of Republican bumper stickers. Sigh.
6 Much like the Malcolm X saying about Plymouth Rock.
7 HEYO!
8 Word to the wise: Always have an emergency blow-dryer.
9 Another word to the wise: Never let it come to that. Have an emergency stash of hair products everywhere you go.
10 I’m like a hair joke writing machine!
11 I’d be pissed if I were one of her two “boys”—they’re her sons, yet her “#1 guy” is some long-haired singer?
12 I realize that wearing a sheath dress and pumps on a Bushwick rooftop probably doesn’t make sense, but this is my fantasy, and in fantasy world, your feet never hurt from standing in heels for too many hours. Go with it.
13 Although I doubt her Buddhist teachings were ever meant to be applied to cocktail banter about spite fucking an American Idol reject.
14 Constantine Fever is almost like Cat Scratch Fever, only with less Ted Nugent and more hives.
15 Weston High School, Class of 1998, “Best Hair.”
16 The Heisman is awarded to one college football player each year. It’s a big deal among collegiate football players. The trophy is a statue of a football player cradling the ball with one arm and pushing away any oncoming players with his other hand out. Thus, being rejected can be called “getting the Heisman” because you are being pushed away. The trophy’s existence and the fact that “sacking” is something that happens to the quarterback comprise the extent of my football knowledge. Oh, and that when a team decides to blitz, shit gets crazy. More on that in Chapter 14.
17 Richard Hatch, who failed to pay taxes on his prize money and served jail time because of it.
18 I hate people who videotape or photograph an experience in its entirety rather than actively living that experience as it happens. That behavior makes me insane. I saw people doing that inside the Sistine Chapel in Rome—obsessing over capturing imagines of the ceiling (illegally) with their crappy cameras. You can buy a postcard with a clear image of that gorgeous ceiling that will be better than you could ever capture and you can look at that postcard later on, but right now you’re here beneath this amazing fresco. Just lean your head back and enjoy looking up at the real thing—this gorgeous ceiling that Michelangelo painted. Just stop and be here for a moment—enjoy this live experience. Why are you taping or photographing this? Preserving it for posterity? Ya know what’s a lot more fun? Being actively engaged in what’s happening right here and right now and having a great memory of this experience. Fucking morons.
19 Dumb chills are goose bumps that you get when something is super corny or lame.
20 Just like Bob Seger crooned about, “Here I am . . . on the road again.”
21 I would insert a joke about Ke$ha’s song “Your Love Is My Drug” here if she didn’t make me turn into a curmudgeonly old lady. Ke$ha needs to stand up straight, stop dressing like an asshole, and not end a hit song with a silly throwaway line such as “I like your beard.” Got it, young lady!?
22 Note: This venue is no longer there, so don’t go trying to visit that venue in your tour of my backroom comedy shows.
23 They dated for two months, then got engaged. How amazing is that? They’ve now been married forty-plus years. Thank God she found a good colorist when she did!
24 Perhaps this is obvious, but this book is not on the “favorites” list of the American Cancer Society.
25 I’m not even being paid by DDs to push for their coffee—I genuinely love it. But if a Dunkin’ Donuts executive is reading this, please make me your spokeswoman! I adore your coffee so much that I call it “Deeze Nuts” or just “the Deeze” and drink at least one cup a day.
26 My eighth-grade science teacher, Mr. Stasik, would be so proud of how I’m using his brilliant lessons. To teach people how to get tan!
27 In this life, we’re each on our own path. And this path is going to lead you to hotness.
28 Ya like that, imaginary Deeze Nuts exec? I’m not afraid to throw in two references to your coffee. Give me that job as your spokeswoman!
29 This isn’t a friggin’ Earth Science textbook.
30 That’s not a reference to masturbation, I swear!
31 This is the closest that I will ever come to donating my body to science. Sorry, scientists.
32 Product not available until 2074 and comes in flavors Wicked Awesome, Banana, and Polka Dot.
33 The brilliant Tim Gunn is with me in this opinion. (See his wonderful book Gunn’s Golden Rules.)
34 Nothing’s disturbing the way it goes around. Where are my Edie Brickell & New Bohemians fans at?
35 “How Hair Coloring Works” by Marshall Brain on TLC’s How Stuff Works blog.
36 The few positive math experiences of my life were in geometry, which is an exciting form of math because it’s all about shapes and degrees and assorted other things that I can see and that actually exist, and in a class called Explorations in Math during my freshman year in college, where I rubbed elbows with the football and hockey teams.
37 If you are not familiar with This Is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner’s brilliant rockumentary, please update your Netflix queue immediately.
38 Though now, in retrospect, I think it was a fantastic exercise. Every blonde should spend a few months on the dark side, just to see what it’s like.
39 Hair brings people of all races together! If I ever run for office, I will run on a hair-focused platform and I’ll score a wide array of supporters, mark my words.
40 Lady Gaga’s hit song “Born This Way” is an anthem for the gay community that can fit quite well for being dope.
41 Actually happened. Verbatim. Professionalism at its best!
42 Is Supertramp underrated as hell, or is it just me?
43 Note that what Suzanne refers to as an “adult bowl cut” is something that I perceived as a mullet. For more on that, see Chapter 10.
44 Like a hair color version of a horror movie where the calls are coming from inside the house!
45 This sounds bonkers, I know, but just days prior, Eric had called my house and left messages three times in a row while I was out at the mall, so I felt like I could call hi
m two times in a row. Yes, girls keep track of that shit.
46 “Packie” is Massachusetts-speak for a package store, or an establishment that sells liquor or beer.
47 Brit-speak for apartments.
48 The copyright holders of said pop culture item, that’s who.
49 Our group’s name came from a Pez dispenser with a Yoda head on top. Comedy!
50 Hell of a good band name right there.
51 More on bringing gifts as good manners in Chapter 11.
52 Mixing Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Dr. Phil McGraw is blasphemy in the psychiatry community, I’m sure. Sorry, guys!
53 The original on Fox, not the CW reboot. I’m not a tween tool.
54 That Kool and the Gang song was about dinner parties. Nuts, huh?
55 I grew up and traded in a bronzer addiction for a quiche addiction. I have an addictive personality, so what? At least it’s not heroin.
56 Just trust me on this visualization exercise.
57 Just kidding. Do not do that.
58 The George W. Bush of wine, if you will.
59 Yes, I’m the best granddaughter ever. Duuuuudes.
60 And I’m not talking about a glove without fingers to make cigarette smoking easier. I’m talking about fingerless gloves like you see in those period dramas on the BBC.
61 Sounds like a few of my ex-boyfriends—HEYO!
62 Seriously, guys—who killed Biggie and Tupac?
63 Only kidding. Life isn’t like an episode of Family Feud with judges looming overhead, no matter how many times I say “Judges, will we accept that?” in conversation while looking skyward.
64 The lyrics to “Rocket Queen,” Guns N’ Roses two-songs-in-one big finish to the album Appetite for Destruction.
65 What I often refer to as “cocktails on the veranda.”
66 In a similar scene, I was once at a tiny upstate New York bar whose exterior sign bragged that it was “nothing but a good time.” Their staff was very earnest about this theme, and it cracked me up because this bar was a lame watering hole in a tiny town. But it was a good time, I’ll admit. Alas, just when we were having a good time at this bar (the self-anointed epicenter of good times), my friends and I put money in the jukebox and played Poison’s “Nothing But a Good Time” and then the universe exploded.
67 I know a lot about music, as you can see from my refined musical vocabulary.
68 Please note: I literally got an F in Algebra II when we studied this stuff. So if this is wrong, I wouldn’t be surprised. Nor would my teacher whose educational theories on algebra incorrectly assume that every student gives a rat’s ass about math.
69 Minus the chicken wire stage cage and Jeff Healey’s brilliance.
70 GnR fanatics might say that we took Axl’s lyric “I’m going to watch you bleed” a bit too literally.
71 Question: Does the term “semibananas” make you picture a semitruck filled with bananas, half of a single banana, or a bunch of half bananas? I use that question with people like a conversational Rorschach test for whether or not they’re psychopaths.
72 Before I made an effort to learn about football, I hadn’t heard the word “scrimmage” since I played high school field hockey and a scrimmage was a preseason game that wasn’t on the record. This isn’t what it means here.
73 Get it! Offensive line? Offense jokes! (This is why I was never good at sports—I don’t care about the sport. I care about jokes and wordplay.)
74 Unless you’re in a modern-day remake of The Warriors and you and your leather-vest-wearing friends have just “gotta get back to Coney!”
75 At times like those, Bruce Springsteen was right: Sometimes it feels like you’re a rider on a downbound train.
76 We may be living in an Orwellian Nineteen Eighty-Four–esque land, but occasionally it makes life easier. And the automatic cutoff at the gas pump is one of those times. I love you, Big Brother!
77 And who uses a word like “gander” anyway?
78 Sadly, none of these couples are still together.
79 CHEERS! Hell yeah, Boston! Go Red Sox!
80 But at the close of the film, we learn that Mandy eventually married Bluto. Some blondes can outgrow their shallow, judgmental ways, it seems.
81 It almost feels like he wasn’t really looking for love during those three seasons in front of the cameras. Hard to imagine, I know.
82 Traveling from tiny venue to bar room venue to nostalgia showcase.
83 Yes, that’s a hair pun.
84 You certainly know Suzanne by now, what with the tales of all our adventures and accidents already covered in this book.
85 Limestone, Maine, rolls deep!
86 Lobster everywhere! Coastline all over the place!
87 Suzanne and I have always loved debating possible plans using elaborate, numbered tallies or pro/con lists. It’s the best way to explore all possible options, especially when you’re grappling with important issues such as restaurant selection.
88 Over the years, we have done a lot of identical ordering and shopping. The one that I find the most cringe-worthy is a shopping excursion we once took to Newbury Comics on Route 9, where we proceeded to buy identical sunglasses and the same album (311’s Greatest Hits). Told ya it was cringe-worthy.
89 My nickname. How much does it rule?
90 She followed my directions about dating outside your hair color group, as we discussed in Chapter 15.
91 “Ratting” your hair was what teasing your hair was called in that era. Gross, huh?
92 It’s because of this terrible lesson in the end of Grease that my high school theater director always refused to put up the show at our high school. I completely understand and respect his decision, but come on, Mr. Minigan, my blond hair could have rocked the role of Sandy!
93 Blonde-vs.-brunette tension need not be lifelong, though, as we saw when Elle and Vivian eventually became best buddies.
94 Fawcett returned as a guest star in a few episodes of seasons three and four due to contractual obligations.
95 This poster hangs on the walls of fraternity houses to this day. Now that is staying power!
96 A very belated thank-you to Katie Ryan’s family for enabling my childhood fluffernutter addiction.
97 There are two sides to every story, though. Read The Dirt, the story of Mötley Crüe, an American classic, for further information.
98 From ages three to seven, I was a dead ringer for Cousin Oliver from The Brady Bunch.
99 Like so many other comedy venues, this one is now closed, too.
100 A real joy to watch.
101 Every standup will tell you that this introduction is what a host says when he doesn’t know your credits or when you have no credits.
102 There’s more to that joke. Yes, unfortunately, much more.
The New Rules for Blondes Page 20