Archives for February 2006

My SiteMeter is showing that we have a new BooMama reader.

From Parchman, Mississippi.

Um. Welcome!???

[Pinched grin.]

To be honest, it’s not really an audience I planned on having.

But we’re, um, delighted to have you, Parchman reader. I’m sure you’re a wonderful person who really didn’t do what the authorities accused you of doing. I’m sure it was all a big mistake.

Really!

[Looks paranoid.]

Now that I think about it, though, I imagine that our Parchman reader is not in fact in prison, just a non-incarcerated resident of the MS Delta. :-)

And seriously – welcome.

When I was a little girl, I had blonde hair. Realllly blonde hair. And even though it got a little darker as I got older, I could keep it “touched up” with highlights once or twice a year. It was a pretty inexpensive solution – I’d sit down in my stylist’s chair, let him or her wrap the top of my head in foils, and 45 minutes later I’d have lovely light blonde highlights to accent the only somewhat darker blonde hair.

And then I got pregnant. Them young’uns, I tell you – they change everything.

For some reason (and I’m sure there are many scientific theories but you know that science, it does not interest me), my hair got much darker and much straighter as a result of my pregnancy. I thought at the time that, once Alex was born, my hair would magically lighten and curl again, but such was not the case.

As a result, I was forced into an expensive bi-monthly highlighting habit. And the stuff in the box or the bottle? It wasn’t an option. Oh, several times I tried to self-highlight, but the results were always disastrous: my hair would turn out orange-ish, streaky, brassy, and one time in particular, somewhat green. I usually ended up back at the salon I was trying to avoid, with my home-highlighted head hung in shame. I would be reprimanded by my stylist, spend 45 minutes with color strippers and re-activators and de-activators on my head, and then, with some semblance of normal blonde color restored, I would pay my $140, promise to never darken Walmart’s hair color aisle again, and go about my bottled blonde business.

For the last year or so I’ve been a good little hair salon girl. I’ve left the highlighting to the professionals, and I haven’t so much as eyeballed a box of Nice and Easy or Feria or whathaveyou.

But this past weekend, I fell off of the wagon.

I should tell you that for the last couple of weeks I’ve been bummed out by my hair. The cut is fine – but the color has looked mousy and dull and boring. It’s hard to get an appointment at my salon, and besides that, I’m cheap. I haven’t wanted to spend the big bucks. I figured I’d go with the natural look for the rest of the winter, then brighten myself up with some highlights in the spring.

That was before I saw several of my friends this past weekend. I couldn’t help but notice the way their highlights framed their face, or the way their color expertly covered the gray, or the way they looked bright-eyed and radiant because they had something other than dishwater blonde hair falling onto their foreheads. And Friday night, in a fit of spontanaiety, I said, “Hey! Who wants to highlight my hair?”

Tracey was all over it. She couldn’t get to CVS fast enough.

And that is how Tracey and I found ourselves at Katy’s kitchen table at 11:00 Saturday night – me with a plastic cap on my head, Tracey with the little plastic tool that enabled her to pull my hair through the openings in the cap, Katy asleep on her couch and completely oblivious to both of us. Oh, we had a large time, with a great deal of our conversation sounding like what you’d hear in any Southern beauty shop: “And then I told her…well, I didn’t believe it at first, but honey, it IS true…can you believe that? I could not BELIEVE that…yes, and he is her second husband – wonder what she’ll do to her third?”

You get the idea.

I was fairly apprehensive about the whole process, what with Tracey not being a trained cosmetologist and all. I do give her great credit, because she was as thorough as could be, even if I did let out a few “YEEEEOWWWW”s as she tried to get various tangled masses through very small plastic holes. Then she mixed up the solution, put it on my hair, and for 27 minutes, we waited.

Imagine my surprise when I washed and dried my hair and discovered highlights that were the perfect shade of blonde. Not brassy. Not orange. Not green. Just a light, pretty blonde color – exactly what I would’ve wanted and expected if I was shelling out $140 at a salon.

And you know what it cost? $9.99.

Plus tax, of course.

I think Tracey may have found her post-mama calling.

*This weekend I learned that Curl Up And Dye is the name of an actual salon outside of Memphis. Only in the South, y’all.

Blogger just spontaneously ingested a long post that I started this morning, and the recent events convince me that the internets, they conspire against me. I’ll try to recreate the post this afternoon if Alex will cooperate and take a nice, long nap, preferably one about four hours in length.

I’m way overdue, I know – I’m starting to feel like I did my freshman year in college, when I had a paper due on Dante’s Inferno but, funny thing, I didn’t actually read Inferno, which made the writing a bit problematic. Fortunately for me, my current writing doesn’t require any background work except for, you know, living, so hopefully I’ll get back up to speed soon.

After a loooong day of traveling, Alex and I rolled into the garage about 7:15 tonight. I have burned up the interstate the last couple of days, but it was so worth it. Just a few items of note before I put the little man in the tub and try to recharge my batteries before Monday morning hits:

1) If someone ever questions whether Southern hospitality still exists, he or she needs to attend a gathering that Melanie and Katy coordinate. OH MY WORD at the spreads and dips and fruits and unusual chip products and whole grain breads and meats and cheeses and exotic cracker assortments. While Melanie acted like she just ran by Whole Foods and “picked up a few things,” she actually purchased approximately one quarter of the Baton Rouge store’s inventory and then created a beautiful tablescape with her McCarty pottery. Katy, competely on the sly, planned a private little shopping excursion to this great place called FeBe, arranged for us to get our make-up done, and then surprised me with a purse that I had pointed out in the first few minutes we were shopping (when I got home and David saw the purse, he said, “so, did the person who designed that know you? Because it looks exactly like you”). Thanks, K & M. Everything was perfect.

2) If someone ever wonders why my former neighbor Kristi and I got along so well, I will explain it now: we laugh almost non-stop when we’re in each other’s company. Even though we hadn’t seen each other in about four years, it was like someone had just hit a pause button on our last in-person conversation, and this weekend we got to pick up exactly where we left off.

3) If someone ever tries the sweet tea at the Popeye’s in McComb, MS, and finds it entirely too sweet, think long and hard before you ask an employee if there’s any unsweetened tea. Tracey asked today, and she received the following reply: “I don’t know.” I kind of appreciated the complete lack of interest in customer care and wondered how that laissez-faire attitude might filter down into other Popeye’s inquiries. Just imagine:
“Do y’all have any fried chicken?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do y’all have any biscuits?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do y’all have any food?”
“I don’t know.”

4) If someone is ever reluctant to leave a toddler with grandparents because they think the toddler will miss them terribly and never know happiness again, be ye not afraid. As it turns out, toddlers are actually beside themselves with happiness when unlimited supplies of Coke, pizza, ice cream, cookies, Coke, donuts, Cheetos, Coke, Coke, and Coke are available. As I pulled out of Mama and Daddy’s driveway this afternoon, Alex actually started to cry and said, “I wanna stay with Pappa! Wanna eat Cheetos!”

5) If someone wants to understand one of the reasons why I feel blessed beyond all measure, he or she should meet my friends. On my little three-day road trip I got to see some friends from every stop in the road: childhood friends, high school friends, college friends, neighbor friends. It made me appreciate the friends I got to see and miss the ones I didn’t…but more than anything, if just made me grateful.

More later.

Since I’m about to leave for my weekend in the Red Stick, posting will be sporadic at best over the next few days. I could try to post from Mama and Daddy’s house tonight, but since Daddy will not give up dial-up for love or money, it might be a little too frustrating to try to work the interweb from Casa de Old School Technology.

I’m not exactly sure how I will cope with not running to the “blog site” as soon as a thought pops into my mind, but it should be fun to interact with, you know, people. Might not be a bad idea for me to get out of my little blog bubble for a few days.

Y’all play sweet while I’m gone.

Several of y’all know my friend Lea Margaret. For those of you who don’t, you are 1) missing a treat and 2) in need of a little background information.

If there were a Scale of Southern-ness, and said scale ranged from 1 to 10, I would probably fall somewhere around a 7. I do the whole Southern Living subscription / cook everything from scratch / love to decorate / take pride in my heritage / would-curl-into-the-fetal-position-if-for-some-reason-I-lost-my-accent thing.

But I don’t decorate my front porch based on the seasons, I don’t hunt or ride horses, and I’ve never made a mint julep. I cannot trace my family tree back to the Founding Fathers, I’ve never been to the Kentucky Derby, and I’ve never spent more than 24 hours on the banks of the Mississippi River. I do not have a double name. So while I rank pretty high on the scale, I have some definite Southern shortcomings.

Lea Margaret, however, is the standard bearer for the Scale of Southern-ness, the person who establishes what a 10 should be. I met her in college, where she wore mostly dresses and riding boots and always, always had a bow or scarf in her hair. She grew up in the Delta, went to boarding school in Tennessee, rode horses every spare second, and, I imagine, hunted a fox or two. She started her own successful business when she got her degree, and you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that her business specialized in silver jewelry and hairbows.

She’s the kind of person who, when you visit her, leaves “happies” for you and your family in the bathroom: a soap you might enjoy, an interesting new shampoo, a copy of your favorite magazine that you can peruse in the tub. She can create a beautiful floral arrangement using only kudzu, johnson grass, and Queen Anne’s lace. She has a guest book. In her house. And she insists that you sign it.

A few years ago Lea Margaret and her hubby Chris moved to Dallas because of Chris’ job. It was somewhat traumatic for LM, who had never lived west of the Mississippi. But she adjusted to life out there and found her way – and I think eventually she came to appreciate that Texans treasure their regional identity as much as we Southerners do.

Right before LM moved she found out that she was expecting (sidenote: people who rank 10 on the Southern scale “expect” babies; they do not “get pregnant”), so while I imagine that Texas will always be special to her and Chris because it’s where Mac was born, it was never “home.” And if you wanted to see the very embodiment of agony and frustration, you should’ve seen LM struggle through her first football season in Texas, where the SEC is nothing but an also-ran to the Big 12, where Fox Sports South isn’t even a part of the local cable line-up.

Things went from bad to worse, I’m afraid. After a little over a year in Texas, Chris’ job required that they move to Pennsylvania. PENNSYLVANIA (not that that there’s anything wrong with PA – but putting LM there is the equivalent of putting an eskimo in Hawaii – it just doesn’t make good sense). LM and I did some major email scheming and plotting to try to figure out how she and Chris could get back to the South. I even looked for jobs on the internet and would send LM the links, but it seemed like they were destined to be far, far away from the rest of us.

Resigned but determined, just as Scarlett O’Hara would have been, LM decided to make the best of it, comforted at least in small part because the town where they live “is still south of the Mason-Dixon line.”

Given all this information, you can imagine my joy when I received the following email from LM today: “We are moving to Vicksburg! Leaving PA the 23rd. We are MORE than excited!”

Y’all, this news is the equivalent of the Starship Enterprise finding its way back to earth. Lassie finding his way home. Dorothy and Toto making it back to Kansas. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s like Jesus ascending into heaven to sit at the right hand of God the Father or anything like that. But still, it’s a pretty big deal.

Lea Margaret will be back in Mississippi again, within driving distance of her beloved Bulldodgs, with the Delta a stone’s throw away, with her lifelong friends mere minutes down the road, and with the Mississippi River right there in her backyard. And for the first time, she’ll have her husband and her child by her side in the state she loves more than any other.

Welcome Home, Lea Margaret. We surely have missed you.