An Arresting Tale Of My Hair
Friday, October 5, 2012

Hello there Internet! I know, right? Long time, no talk.

I want you to know, even though I've been neglecting my little spot in cyberspace, I'm not lazing around dropping grapes into my mouth. I temporarily vacated my little condo inside my computer because I've been a hundred and one kinds of busy in the real world.

I've been traveling. So get ready for vacation pictures in upcoming posts because who doesn't love other people's vacation pictures?

This girl, that's who. But still, that won't stop me from showing you my winning photos.

I've also been battling my arch-enemy, Ab Fat. As we speak, Ab Fat is winning.

And I've been busy with my other job—motherhood. That role includes me yelling several times a day that I am not the maid, making my girls feel awkwaaarrrd every time I speak out loud, breaking up wicked fights over "borrowed" makeup and assisting my senior daughter and her friends with college applications which, by the way, are redonkulous these days. The only vital information they don't require are blood samples and I'm sure that's just one piece of red tape away.

I've also been cooking a whole lot and you know what I discovered about that?

Cooking's hard, y'all. Cooking is, in fact, a douchebag.

First, you have to actually plan the meal which involves perusing food blogs and getting sidetracked by Mark Ruffalo pictures:
                                         (Just as yummy as a five-course meal, if not more) 

Then there's the shopping, all the endless chopping and stirring and simmering and timing of the meal.

It's a couple of hours out of my day and for what? For a 10 minute, (15 if I'm lucky) sit-down with my family where everyone is too busy shoving the food down their pieholes to even talk.

Last night, my hubs requested a meatloaf, so I searched for the baddest-ass meatloaf I could find. And after a few Mark photos:
                                                                  Now that's a meatloaf

I found it—a mixture of ground chuck, pork and veal with homemade bread crumbs, a chili sauce- infused glaze all wrapped up in bacon.

Oh. My. Gah.

My arteries turned into solid concrete overnight, but boy-oh-boy, was that thing delicious. And a hell of a lot of work. Only to be told by my daughter as she pushed it around her plate, whining, "This is like old people food. Like your generation of old. My generation doesn't eat meat in a loaf."

I made her clean the kitchen for calling me old.

Cooking. Waste of a life, is what it is.

I now realize my mom was onto something with her Fishstick Fridays and canned hash.

And of course, let's not forget, while I've been away from you I've been revising or on some days staring at a blinking cursor until I give up and watch cute dog videos and search for Mark Ruffalo pictures.
                                      Mmm Mmm Good. That's what Mark Ruffalo is, Mmm Mmm Good. 

So, that's what I've been up to and now I owe you a blog post, one that's been a long time coming.

Long, long ago, like back in the days of dial-up,  I promised you an arresting story about my hair. You probably don't remember, Internet, but I do. Sometimes when I'm wide awake in the middle of the night, sorting through the tedium of my life, I think, Egads! I still owe the Internet that story about my hair.

And since I'd like to sleep more soundly at night and since I try to limit my use of the word egads, I am now finally living up to my word. Don't everyone cheer at once. I wouldn't want the earth to shift the wrong way on its axis from the monstrous reverberation.  

But before we get to the hair, I need to tell you something about me. 

It's something I've never said out loud to you, Internet, because my revelation will make you roll your eyes and mutter, "Oh, please" like one would do when noting that Kim Kardashian has posted another Twitter picture of her ass, so colossal it qualifies as a carry-on. 

Don't judge this revelation until you hear me out. Trust me when I say this thing I'm about to confess even baffles me.

Sometimes I roll my eyes at myself. 

So here it is: 

Men are drawn to me like Lindsay Lohan to ankle monitoring bracelets, like Fred Willard to jerkin' the gherkin in public, like myself to every exotic fatal disease on Web M.D. 

I'm not bragging. In fact, I have no bragging rights to claim. 

I'm below the average height for women. I have large pores. I haven't seen anything close to a jutting hipbone since Bill Clinton was dating interns. I cannot talk without my flailing hands and I mean huge, jazz-hand movements, like directing-the-747-out-the-gate hand motions. Oil of Olay markets a cream just for my kind of turkey neck. And I most certainly do not have moves like Jagger.

I also cannot do math in my head, but from my experience, good math skills don't bring all the boys to the yard. I'm just laying it out there, that sometimes I have to use my fingers for single digit addition. 

This attraction thing is as big of a mystery as Germany's love for the singing of David Hasselhoff. Seriously, I just don't get it. But the truth is, I am a man magnet—short, math-disabled, turkey-neck me. 

One of my friends suggested I might have overly strong pheromones.

I've always had messed up hormones—way too much estrogen and zero testosterone, which would explain why I can't catch a ball, but I don't think I'm secreting some alluring magic ju-ju through my skin nor am I hiding buffalo chicken wings in my bra or dropping chunks of bratwurst behind me as I traipse through life.

My sister says it's my Double B's: Blonde with big boobs, but if any man were to catch a glimpse of my  ta-tas sans bra, they would run screaming for the hills.

Seriously. I would make the National Geographic cover girls jealous with my tube sock boobs.

As for the blonde? Well, now I have to tell you another secret. Whew, today I'm just unloading all my closeted crap on you. First the man magnetism thing and my inability to add anything over the number four—okay three—in my head and now this. Next thing you know, I'm going to be telling you about this one time in band camp . . .

No.

I wasn't in the band. And I've never played a flute . . . Or done anything else with the instrument.

Ahem. Anyway.

When my girls were small, there was a little neighbor girl from around the block who would come over to play on a regular basis. She was older than my girls, about eight or nine, with luxurious, glossy jet-black hair, big blue eyes and a sweet smile.

I couldn't stand the bitch.

She was obnoxious. She teased my girls mercilessly. She was known to pinch. She was a constant liar. She would rip the heads off the Barbie dolls and try to blame it on my youngest who couldn't talk yet.

But I knew it was her, that little Cruella.

Please, bitch. I have three girls. They've been schooled in Barbie etiquette since their first day in the bassinet.

The number one rule of Barbie play is never rip off a Barbie head. It's not like the olden days when the heads popped on and off convienently. The folks at Barbie have ensured an ongoing high profit margin by redesigning the Barbie so that when the head comes off, just like in real life, Barbie is as dead as Anne Boleyn. Every girl who's a professional Barbie player knows to never, ever rip off a Barbie head.

So, this beautiful, dark-haired Cruella was a spoiled only child who thought the world revolved around her and made it a point to be as mean-girl as possible in every one of her waking moments. On most days, she stormed out of my house leaving a trail of teary-eyed casualties in her teasing wake. But the bitch was relentless, ringing my doorbell day after day after day and since my girls had a love/hate relationship with this spawn of the devil, they welcomed Cruella with open arms every dang time.

One day, she was pissing me off even more than usual. So, I took her aside for the four millionth time to lecture her about socially acceptable behavior, which most certainly did not include telling my middle daughter that she needed to lie on the ground and be the throw rug while they played House.

Seriously, This girl had her bitch game down.

As usual, when Cruella found herself in trouble, she'd try to distract me by throwing out compliments like shiny gold coins.

And honestly?

It always worked because I can totally be bought. Especially with compliments.

But not this time.

This time she smiled at me with her future Real Housewives' smile and said, "Miss Joann, your hair is so pretty. Is blonde hair magical?"

I paused for a second, almost sucked in by her Eddie Haskell ways, but then I smiled just as craftily back and said, "Yes, it is. It's very magical and I get anything I want because of my blonde hair. All blondes do, but you'll never know about that, since you're not a blonde."

Yes I did. Yes I did. Somebody please tell em who the eff I is.

We lost track of Cruella along the way, but my guess is she's now an over-processed bottle blonde with straw hair and bad skin working at CVS, wondering as she listlessly rings up tampons and toothpaste, when she's going to get everything she wants.

I am an evil human being.

And now back to my story.

Again, I have no utter clue why I have this effect on men, but I do. I have stories but I'm not here to make any of you roll your eyes more than you already have while reading this. I wouldn't want to be responsible for your eye popping out of your socket or anything. I'll just say, men kind of really like me, but today we're just going to talk about one of those men.

The man who got arrested because of my hair.

That's right. My hair.

A few years ago, we were skiing in Colorado with a group of friends. 

And when I say we were skiing, I mean they were all catapulting down icy hills on tiny wooden sticks, dangerously close to the edge of the mountains. I tried to like skiing, but skiing didn't like me. So I went shopping. A much better sport. 

One late afternoon, we paid a visit to some friends who were vacationing in a different town than ours. It was the last day of the ski season and their town was in full party mode—big crowds, music, free-flowing drinks and serious revelry. 

We found our friends on an outdoor lounge patio in the middle of town enjoying some refreshing libations.
                                            Some of my friends with some of their libations

The slopes had closed for the day, so my hubs had the ingenious idea to borrow some cafeteria trays from a restaurant and take our Julia and her friend Haley up the slope for some tray sledding because we are super classy people.

I sat on the patio, a libation in hand, watching the girls tray-sled down the mountain, my back to the busy main walkway running through town. An important fact to keep in mind.

My friends were all gathered on the patio, a group of husbands and wives, husbands who all happen to be 6'3" and above. Another important fact to keep in mind.

As I sat there, enjoying the blue skies, tray sledding and of course, the libations, I suddenly felt someone embrace me from behind, an embrace so tight, so intimately familiar, I assumed it was one of our men . . . until a decidedly UNfamiliar voice whispered in my ear, "I love your hair."

I whipped around to see who had me in their straitjacket clutch and that's when this dude I'd never seen in my life, said, "Oh my G-d! I love your eyes!"

I was confused. Who was this goateed man with his arms around me, his face inches from mine? Had he mistaken me for someone else, someone with small pores?

He said, "I love your hair. It's so hot. You're hot."

I think I answered, "Uhhh" as I wondered if perhaps the man was blind and drunk. (He did end up being intoxicated on unknown substances. Explains so very much.)

Suddenly, I noticed his mouth moving towards my face. His first kiss caught me square on the mouth. I reflexively turned my head away from him and he started sloppy kissing the side of my turned face, his whiskers leaving a tender mark upon my skin. But before he could gook up my cheek too much with his slobber, he was abruptly lifted up off the ground.

From my panicked vantage point, it looked like he was fluttering away, like he'd floated down from fairy heaven to steal kisses and whoosh away—a blind, drunk, kiss-thieving, goateed fairy. But then, my hairy fairy was promptly slammed into the side of the Coors beer truck parked next to the patio.

One of our football player sized husbands had taken matters into his own hands.

The bandit kisser was descended upon by the group of husbands who, for the record, did not lift a finger, only their voices when they asked him in rather impolite terms what he thought he was doing. Our large team of testosterone was all up in the dude's face, but the bandit kisser who was half the size of these guys, wasn't backing down as he defended his love for my hair.

I was more than a mite freaked out and as soon as the yelling began, I scurried away, ducking around the corner of the patio building, peeking out at the escalating scene unfolding before me.

It didn't take long for Security to arrive. After calming everyone down, or at least trying to, (the goatee kissing bandit fairy was still proclaiming his right to love me without my consent) Security questioned everyone and then turned to the guy who was still shouting out his love for my hair and said, "Dude, calm down. What do you think you're doing? Do you see the size of these guys?"

Even his friends tried to convince him to leave, but the Bandit Kisser was too worked up by this point. Finally, Security told him he had to get out of Dodge or at least off of Copper Mountain.

His friends dragged him away and we thought that was the end of that. We'd just settled down and gone back to our libations when my husband showed up from tray-sledding and said, "Anything good happening down here?"

My knight in shining armor.

Our group of now indignant men were filling him in when someone suggested we go back to the condo and order pizza so everyone could settle their frazzled nerves. Our crowd was big and so I didn't notice until we were ensconced in our friend's place, that my hubs was among the missing.

Now this is quite commonplace when it comes to my husband. He is a nomad in public places, wandering off to wherever strikes his fancy. And he has a lot of fancies.

We have a catch phrase whenever we're out and about: "Where's Bill?"

Yes. I have revealed my husband's name after all these years. It's Bill. I know. You're totally knocked over by its originality.

My friend Debbie claims she's going to get WHERE'S BILL? t-shirts that we can all wear when we're out, so we can spare ourselves from saying it one trillion times.

At the condo, I kept asking everyone if they'd seen him as a slow-spreading panic started to gnaw at me.

No one knew.

The men left to look for him, all of us sensing trouble, trouble with a capital T that rhymes with P that stands for Pissed Off Husband.

It seemed like hours, but finally the men showed up with my husband in tow.

With a story. An arresting story.

It seemed that my kissing bandit did not leave town. In fact, he hightailed it in to the closest bar right under the watchful eyes of the security team who had ordered him to leave.

My hubs, who had quietly disappeared so that he could "work things out" with the dude, came upon the scene just as the po-po got there. They took my hub's statement and then the security team pointed the officers towards the bar. They tromped in to escort the kissing bandit out and that's when that wacky kissing bandit decided he needed to shove a police officer.

That's right. Shove. A. Police Officer.

Within seconds, the kissing bandit was on the ground, hog-tied with a taser leveled at him.

My hubs stood over the dude and said, "This is what happens, man, when you kiss my wife."

The kissing bandit was put in the back of the squad car and taken away.

And still . . .

That wasn't my last man encounter of the night.

After we finished our pizza, we decided to go check out the AC/DC cover band that was playing in the little bar in the middle of the square

We took our time strolling over to the bar, enjoying the beautiful Colorado night, ready to put the events of the day behind us. The band was rocking. Their wail of a sound reverberated through the doors, flowing out into the street. Our group of ladies headed inside the packed bar to get down with the funk. Usually, I am the first one to get down with the funk, but I was still feeling a little shaky from the whole Kissgate. And since it was a beautiful night with pockets of stars sparkling in the wintery sky, I stayed outside with the men figuring I could take a few minutes to catch my breath before entering the mayhem.

The bar was complete glass from floor to ceiling and we had the best seats in the house, right in front of the band as we stood outside on this gorgeous, crisp night.

And even though I was still a little shell-shocked, I couldn't resist getting my swerve on a little bit. I mean, who on earth could sit still when AC/DC was rocking through the window?

The men in our group can get a tad loud and tonight was no exception. They were rocking out with the band, yelling their admiration from outside the glass walls. I figured when the guitarist, who was inexplicably dressed in a cow suit, kept looking our way throughout the set, it was because of our gang of tall, rowdy men.

It's why I was totally taken by surprise, again, when as I stood there minding my business, just dancing my little dance, without warning, Mr. Cow Suit jumped from the stage, guitar-played his way over to the window and motioned.

To me.

To come on over.

To him.

And so I did.

I know. Shame on me.

And that's when he put his lips up to the glass.

I will tell you I hesitated for half a second, thinking, "Okay, here we go again. What is with this town of kissing men?"

But then I was all, "Well, there is a glass between us. And he is pretty cute, even if he's in cow clothing. And it's not like a real kiss. And he is dressed in a cow suit. I've never kissed a man in a cow suit before."

And so I did.

I zoomed in for a kiss from a guitar playing man in a cow suit, a plate of glass blocking the actual press of lips upon lips.

And all of my man friends were like, "Oh, I see! That's how it is! There she goes again!"

Oh hell, it's hard enough to describe, here's the video

Note: The Carl they are referencing is a friend who loves ACDC but was not with us.

I don't know. Maybe I do have some weird porterhouse pheromone or something

The Colorado police called me a few weeks later to get my version for their report.

At midnight.

Clearly no one has informed the police of the difference in time zones.

Still dull from sleep, I managed to tell the officer how a man spied me from across a walkway, fell in love with my hair and then attempted to slobber his cooties all over my face.

I then asked the officer if perhaps we could just forget the whole thing. I mean, it was only a kiss. But the kiss wasn't the problem, the attempted assault of a police officer was the botheration and I certainly couldn't blame that on my bacon burger hormones.

So, there you have it. The sad tale of a man who loved my hair just a little too much for his own good.

I hope he's okay. I hope his hair-loving, kiss-thieving, police-assaulting crime was his one and only offense. I'd hate to think a life of crime got its start with my hair.

In fact, you know what I would love to see? If Karma could take the kissing bandit by the hand and lead him across the universe to bottle-blonde Cruella. These two lost souls, inadvertently done in by my hand, could finally the contentment they've been seeking in their never-ending search for fabulous hair.

That would be nice.

That's all I've got. I'll see you soon and I promise not to be such a stranger next time.

Today's Definite Download: The Black Keys' (one of my FAVORITE and I mean FAVORITE bands), "Gold On The Ceiling." Check them out, right here

They wanna get . . . 
They wanna get
My gold on the ceiling

Blondes might not have more fun, but they get more men arrested. And that's all I have to say about that. 







13 comments:

Gigi said...

I love your posts! I really, really do.

And whatever evil may have befallen Cruella - she deserved it. And she's probably still a mean girl. Once a mean girl always a mean girl.

Galit Breen said...

I so love that you had VIDEO PROOF of that story! You hair vixen, you! :)

Christine Macdonald said...

Ohhhhhh this is FUN. SO love the video, too.

Missed you mucho mucho!

xxoo

Unknown said...

That was an arresting post! And I agree with Galit....you are a hair vixen!

karen said...

Ahh Joann, I needed a good laugh tonight and you did not disappoint. Great story - it makes me want to be a blonde. Maybe one of these days...

JoAnna said...

I get so excited when you write a post and I have so many things to say as I read them but then I get to the bottom and I'm dying laughing and have no idea anymore. Your stories are hysterical. My favorite line is "My generation doesn't eat meat in a loaf." I'm actually surprised that hasn't come out of my very own mouth.

I was also highly entertained when you said you thought the kissing bandit was actually floating away. Awesome. Your imagination and mine, together, could put Speilberg out of business for good!

Rebecca Grace said...

Help -- the end of your post was cut off! You know... Where you give us the name and number of your hairdresser! ;-)

Chicken said...

I think Cruela might have found her place on Real Housewives of Miami. Just guessing. The guy who loves your hair? I got nothing. That's bizarre. You must have really nice hair. You had to kiss the guy in the cowsuit. When is that fair ride ever gonna come around again? Love your stories Joann Mannix.

Amara said...

Oh I hope she's at CVS. That's where mean girls belong - unless we could create a larger than average dog run (well used) and throw them all inside for the duration of their useless lives. Okay I'm feeling a little harsh. Thanks for your kind comment on my blog. Love your stories!

Baby Sister said...

Lol. That video is awesome!! Being blonde got me in trouble a lot in Spain, but it's fun to laugh about it now .:)

Pat said...

Damn, girl! I might just have to go back being a blonde! That sounds like fun! Well, not the part of a stranger slobbering all over your face, but, still!

Gosh I sure missed you!

Unknown said...

That does it. I'm going blond.

Vevetta said...

in conclusion absolutely everything can be solved by a picture of Mark Ruffalo. He could indeed save the world and the blondes.

http://millionlightsahead.blogspot.com

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