My request for stories of heartache and heartburn recently resulted in this story of sexual woe from a former CNNer who shall remain anonymous:
"I was inspired to write in after reading about how broke we all were as VJs. I was so broke that one night over too many drinks, when a friend of mine offered to give me a free haircut, I seized the opportunity. She decided to give me what she called a "pixie cut". Despite the fact that I have a very round face, it seemed reasonable. She was in beauty school after all. And from what I understood, she was at the top of her class. A skilled technician. An artist even. After another glass of Chardonnay it occurred to me that it was crazy not to take advantage of this situation. I figured with the money saved I could finally afford to buy that big box of Tampax I'd been eyeing at Eckerd Drugs. Best of all, she even had her scissors with her.
When we got back to my apartment, I don’t even know how she had the confidence to grab massive hunks of my hair and chop them off. Maybe it was the cockiness that comes from being the gold star student at a beauty school in a suburban Atlanta strip mall, next to the Popeye's chicken hut. I guess all that fame went to her head. I know it went to mine.
I passed out and was convinced it hadn’t actually happened, despite the mounds of hairy evidence in the kitchen. Somehow the thought was just too awful to actually be true. I woke up the next day and stared at my head in the mirror for five minutes. I cried for ten. My round head had less than an inch of hair on it. I looked like a Monchichi.
The next day would be my initial appearance into the public eye. Of course my female co-workers were such liars. “Oh, it’s so cute!” they’d say. Meanwhile they were shuddering the way you do at gruesome photos in medical journals.
As for my friend, even she couldn’t convince me she was proud of her handiwork. She ran her fingers through it and said,
“Maybe next time I cut your hair, I’ll skip the third margarita.”
Next time! How could she think there’d be a next time?
But the greatest travesty of my haircut is that I began to feel invisible. It seemed that I just disappeared. I simply blended into the background, like mold or grocery store music. Men would literally bump into me on their way to prettier, longer-haired women. They didn’t even stop to apologize, probably because they didn’t want to spend one extra second in the presence of my haircut. Even my fuck buddy wanted nothing to do with me. Women would look at me and breathe a sigh of relief because I did not pose a threat.
In my depression, it occurred to me that my "friend" had turned me into a sexless blob of a human being. Had I not been so damn broke, I would not have entertained the notion of a free haircut. Now, because of my pitiful financial state, no one would sing me songs of desire or compose poetry professing their eternal love for me. I didn’t even feel like a woman. I basically had no sex organs. I was I was like one of those gender-nebulous figures on pedestrian crossing signs.
The point is: that bitch stole my vagina. I did not get laid for almost two years."
1 comment:
Oh yes. I, too, was also too poor to afford getting professional haircuts/color on my crappy salary at CNN. Thanks to Tightwad Ted, I became a casualty of a do-it-yourself makeover gone terribly awry.
One day, in 1998, I decided it was time for a change. At the time I had very long blonde hair, and thought "What the heck! Let's go red!" I went to Kroger and bought some ColorVive or Feria or some shit like that. I retreated to my bathroom and started putting the color in. I remember the sheer panic that ensued as I realized that #1 there wasn't enough die to cover my whole head of hair, and #2 my roots were now the color of a fire truck. I waited the appropriate amount of time, washed out my hair in the shower, and quickly dried my hair to see what my results were. Being that my roots were bright red, and my tips were pinkish blonde, I knew there was only one thing to do. I had to get more dye.
I threw on a ball cap, and ran back to Kroger. I purchased another box of hair dye, this time a darker shade..some sort of doo doo brown or something. I went home and repeated the steps I did before, with one additional step. Because there clearly was not enough dye in the box to cover my whole head, I took some scissors and just started hacking away. My hair went from below my shoulders, to just below my ears. Because I couldn't reach all the way around my own head, the hair in the back went into a 'V' shape. After putting on the brown hair dye, I finally came to my senses and realized what I had done.
Because I was still too poor and now too embarrassed to go to a regular stylist, I was in a total state of panic. Right about then, my phone rang. It was the lovely Lesley Creegan. She happened to be having an impromtu girls night at her then boyfriend's apartment that evening (he was out of town.) I told her my dilemma, and she told me to come on over.
There I sat, in said boyfriend's living room (now her wonderful husband, by the way), while Lesley and another VJ alum, Jane, fixed up my homemade auburn-ish bob. They evened out the 'V' in the back, and made my hair much more tolerable to look at. Behold the many talents of former VJ's!
That following Monday, as I walked across the upper deck parking lot to go to work for the first time with my new 'do, I ran into a funny fellow simply named "Dirk." He didn't recognize me at first, and when he did..all he could say was "Wow. You have issues."
Indeed, I did!
P.S. I believe somewhere down the road, I also went to see the strip mall hairstylist/VJ and she put some highlights in my hair (I was still too cheap and embarrassed to go to a real stylist.)
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