OmegaMom is most definitely not blonde. Cast your eyeballs over to the right, to the picture of the Omega females, and you'll see: dark brown (me), very greyed brown (OmegaGranny), black-brown (OmegaDotter). Not a blonde hair amongst us. OmegaMom is not a Fashion Maven, either. I attained my pinnacle of make-up wearing at my wedding eight years ago, where one of my cousins, more adept at fashion and make-up, painted my face--very nicely, I might add. I don't think I've worn make-up since then. I wear Tevas with socks (in the winter) and without socks. Hiking boots. Mom jeans. Turtlenecks during the winter, boatneck tees in the summer. Recently, in a frenzy of de-cluttering in preparation for re-doing OmegaDotter's bedroom, I emptied the closet and storage boxes of old semi-chic wool skirts and linen suits and dresses left over from my days of being a City Gal, way back when. We won't discuss how long ago those days were, or how many times I schlepped those unused clothes along on moves. Here in Small University Town, people wear jeans and sweaters (albeit nice jeans and sweaters) to eat at the high-priced, celebratory-dinner-venue Continental restaurant in town. The only times I see women wearing dresses is at the university symphony performances. It's just not a dressy kind of atmosphere. So when I clicked through from Kitchen Table Math to this NYTimes article on The Golden Girls, it was like reading about an alien race on a distant planet. The article is talking about the phenomenon of "The New York Blonde", apparently a fashion cliché in and around Manhattan. Women who spend big bucks and lots of time in pursuit of the perfect blonde highlighting session. Women who feel that it "creates in the viewer a sense of lack, a message that says, 'I have more than you.' This is power." Highlighting sessions that cost $500. (Excuse me while I pick my jaw up off the floor. The Omegas own a car that has a Blue Book value--if you're really generous--about that much.) I suppose spending that kind of time and money and effort to achieve such a perfect look means "power" to some folk. To me...well...I have never been a girly-girl to that extent. My grandma, whose favorite pastime when I was a teen seemed to be picking at my hair and saying things like, "You'd look so nice if you only..." was always frustrated by my lack of girly-girlishness. She was also frustrated with OmegaGranny's lack thereof, though looking at pics of OmegaGranny from the late '50s, early '60s, she seems to have looked awfully sleek and sophisticated. All that fussing around with hair and make-up and clothes seemed like a waste of good time to me, time better spent reading or thinking or daydreaming. Like my mother before me I perfected a somewhat slap-dash method of putting on make-up, which was, if not required, at least expected of a city gal, but it was at most a desultory attempt. The experiences I had with younger girl cousins who would vanish into bathrooms before family outings and stay in there for an hour and a half before emerging with big hair and lots of make-up always left me baffled. Why spend all that time hiding away and primping and preening when you could be spending time in conversation with all these interesting people? (Okay, that's an assumption right there--I found them interesting, but perhaps to 18-year-olds, they were a bunch of old fuddy-duddies.) The upshot of all this blather: OmegaMom, who is contemplating a small amount of highlighting to cover up the encroaching gray hair (o vanity of vanities, all is vanity!), will never be the owner of a glorious golden mane of hair. Eh. That's okay. I always wanted red hair, anyway. Red heads were interesting. The "blondes have more fun" attitude simply perplexed me; what they were doing just didn't seem "fun" at all. Which is, I suppose, the base of it all: an alien point of view. I'd rather spend a morning hunched over the computer reading blogs. (Disclaimer: I did get my hair permed many many times. OmegaGranny tells me, in retrospect, that it was "poodle hair". Sigh. Looking back, I have to admit she was right. Herewith some evidence.)