The New Rules for Blondes (5 page)

Leah and Danny gave each other a look.

“I’ll just need to borrow your smart phone, Leah”—because my old-school flip phone could barely send a text, much less an email. Leah handed it over, and I began slowly typing my message on her miniature QWERTY keyboard.

“This is a pain in the ass,” I exclaimed, “but I’ll do it for Connie.” We laughed.

Hey Constantine—
I must have taken down your phone number wrong, unless you’re into calling ladies “Mami” and doling out compliments such as “You sound hot.” Either way, I wanted to give you the information about this standup comedy show I run on Wednesday nights.

And then I did something to the tiny, elfin keyboard that made the email send.

“Nooooo!” I shouted as I flailed my body around the filthy hotel bedspread that was probably covered in dried semen and tears. “This can’t be happening! It just fucking
sent
, and I didn’t want it to! I hate your phone! What the fuuuuuuck!?” I wailed.

Leah quickly opened the paper-thin accordion of a bathroom door, which gave the illusion of privacy without actually blocking the sounds of tinkling. “Let me see what you did,” she scolded and grabbed the devil phone from my shaking hands.

“Huh. Yeah. It sent.” She put the phone down on a tiny bedside table.

“But I didn’t even give him the information! I need to send him another message! I look like a psycho! Oh man, this is just like Jon Favreau’s character in
Swingers
when he keeps leaving the voice mails on his ex-girlfriend’s answering machine and they keep getting cut off because he’s rambling, so he has to keep leaving messages,” I lamented. “But I have to! I have to get him the information—otherwise I look crazy,” I decided.

“You think that if you don’t give him the information,
that
is what will make you look crazy?” Leah tried to bring me back down to earth, but I wasn’t having it.

“I just need your phone for
one
more message. Just one more, then I’m done, I promise!” I begged like a drug addict.
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“You’re only allowed one more!” Leah implored and handed me the devil phone.

Whoops! That sent before I was ready. Anyway, so the show is on Wednesday nights at Luca Lounge
22
on Avenue B between 13th and 14th streets in the East Village. It’s standup and storytelling and always a good time. Come by some Wednesday and I’ll buy you a beer. —Selena

OK.

When I didn’t hear back from Constantine after twenty-four hours, I figured that he probably doesn’t check that email address very often so I should tweet him. He said himself, he’s trying to do more on Twitter. And if he’s willing to tweet and retweet with AshWantsToRock, he’d
better
be willing to throw down some 140-character love notes with me. I had already baked this cake of crazy, why not frost it?

@ConstantineM Such a blast at MexiCali Live last night! Great concert, great time!

And then I waited. For him to RT it or at least thank @SelenaCoppock. Or, even better, for Connie to organically tweet about the show and how he
loved
the blonde chick in the crowd.

Alas, there was nothing. No mention of the show, no mention of meeting two hot comediennes outside the venue, no nothing. Just a fat Heisman in
my
face instead of his. How did this go so wrong!? This was a
joke
crush! It was a joke, and somehow I felt completely rejected and embarrassed nonetheless. I was supposed to eat him alive, not the opposite. This was pathetic. The only thing more pathetic and sad than a person who earnestly, genuinely loves a D-list “celebrity” and
American Idol
reject is a person who ironically, jokingly loves a D-list celebrity and somehow still ends up heartbroken.

The heartbreak that day and in the weeks and months after was soothed by the knowledge that it never would have worked out with Constantine anyway. The rule—don’t date a guy who is as hair-obsessed as you are—exists for a reason. It simply won’t work. Sure, he has great hair and I have great hair, but when we eventually got serious enough to cohabit, where would we store our combined collection of hair products? There’s not a bathroom big enough in this world. My root boost spray will never be stored next to Constantine’s curl-separator serum, and that’s OK.

CHAPTER 5

RULE:
Have a Blonde Mentor

H
air-wise, kids are sitting on a gold mine and they don’t even know it. Or rather, a gold mine is sitting on their heads and they don’t know. Children often have phenomenal natural color and exquisite natural highlights, yet they can’t even begin to appreciate those gifts because they don’t understand the intricacies of hair color and hair care. George Bernard Shaw said youth is wasted on the young, but I think a more fitting phrase is that good hair is wasted on the young. Due to this childhood ignorance of hair products and proper application, a hair mentor is a crucial ally for a young person.

I’ve been fortunate that throughout my life, I have received hair guidance and support from a blonde mentor: my mother, Susan. My two sisters, Laurel and Emily, are brown-haired, like my father, so my mother and I always had a blonde bond. Laurel, Emily, and my dad just couldn’t understand my mother’s and my addiction to pale-blue shirts and purple shampoo. Throughout those rough years of adolescence, my mother taught me a lot about life and also, more importantly, about overconditioning. During sixth grade I was addicted to Salon Selectives products, and I’d use dollops of shampoo and conditioner in equal measure. My shower routine was that I’d shampoo my full head, then condition my full head; then, once I dried my hair post-shower, it would appear to be filthier than it was before I even began the whole exercise. My mother was flabbergasted as to how my hair could look perpetually dirty (those were tough times in Selena hair history), and I was clueless about the nuances of conditioner and fine hair. Finally, she sat me down and asked what I was doing in the shower—how was it possible that I could wash my hair and yet be unable to clean my hair? I explained my system and my mother imparted some brilliant advice: Slathering your head with conditioner, from root to tip, will undo any washing that you just did.

“But I want my hair to be soft and conditioner makes it soft,” I explained.

“But this is too much of a good thing. What you have now is beyond soft and downright dirty all over again.” Aha. I, the young ninja, finally understood the prophecy: condition, but only on the ends of your hair. My blonde mentor mother had saved the day by saving my hair.

Every young blonde should have a blonde mentor to keep her away from Sun-In and school her on the intricacies of proper conditioner application—that is, a blonde mentor to keep a young towhead on the proper platinum track. My beautiful mother is an ashy blonde contrast to my brassy blonde ways, and she has always provided me with essential balance and crucial hair care advice.

My mother was something of a hair chameleon throughout my childhood: different cuts, occasional perms, but always ashy blonde highlights. Still, her exemplary hair record includes a few catastrophes since she herself lacked a blonde mentor (her mother was an auburn-haired knockout who didn’t understand Susan’s ashy-haired aspirations). My mother gave me a breakdown of her worst blonde incidents and I share them here, in Susan’s own words.

1960—Peroxide Portside

My parents gave me a present of a seventeen-day cruise from Venice to New York City when I was sixteen. Since I was alone, it was not much fun and rather scary. But I thought that I would make the trip more interesting if I became a blonde. Since my redheaded mother would not have understood this at all, this trip was the perfect time for me to experiment without her presence. I bought a small bottle of peroxide, and in the little sink in my stateroom, I poured and dabbed it on my hair, thinking that somehow the dabbing would be enough and transfer blondeness across my entire head. In my fantasy, I would turn into Marilyn Monroe instantaneously. In reality, my hair was still mousy brown with splotches of white here and there. I looked like I was wearing a polka-dot wig. Even I knew that this experiment had not gone according to plan.

When my parents met me at the ship, my mother had a predictable reaction. There was no screaming, just a set mouth and a determined manner: “Tomorrow I am taking you to my hairdresser, who will straighten out this mess.” Mother went to a small salon on the West Side to get what she called her “touch-ups.” They covered her white roots with auburn hair color so that she could once again become a youthful-looking redhead.

Dad called Mother’s salon “the Cell” because he laughingly accused the owners and the clientele of sympathizing with all things Communist. So I dutifully went, listening for subversive talk but hearing none. But my hair did return to its mousy-brown natural state.

1967—Streaking in Montreal

I was in Montreal working at Expo 67, the World’s Fair. I had seen pictures in magazines of models with beautifully streaked or highlighted hair that looked natural and subtle. I thought that I explained adequately what I wanted at the salon, but
les mèches
(the highlights) that I got were true, thick stripes of light- and dark-GRAY hair. I looked like I was wearing a gray pinstripe suit on my head. This experience gave me a scary preview of what I would look like in forty years—if I let nature take its course, which I had no intention of doing. Not after what I had seen! The remedy for incidents one and two was to have my hair dyed brown to cover the blonde and gray errors. Grrr—thwarted again and again in my attempt to be a blonde.

1969—Cambridge Ring Around the Roots

Once again I thought that I had explained what I wanted, even going so far as to show a picture: “See! See! This is what I want.” Well, you know what is coming. This time my hair looked like straw with an interesting orange corona around my face. I felt like a medieval monk with a bad tonsure, thinking weighty thoughts like, “Where can I hide my head so no one can see me?” After that incident, there was nothing to do but wait. My hair was too damaged to dye it some more.

Thankfully, after that Cambridge “monk look” debacle, my mother met a good colorist and then, in short order, a good man (my father, Michael).
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My mother did her best to help me through the trials and tribulations of life as a young blonde, destined to be awarded “Best Hair” from Weston High School in 1998. She did make a few missteps, though, when she caved into my and my sisters’ childhood pleas and let us get perms. Many, many perms. The worst of which was something called a “nonchemical” natural perm. (Umm . . . if you’re not going to use chemicals to will this straight hair curly, then exactly what are you going to use?) Laurel, Emily, and I lined up for that new type of perm, hoping to have bouncy, 1980s-style curls, but what we got was much worse. “It took all of the shine out of your hair,” my mother recalls. “It looked like something was dead on top of your head.” My mother got a bad perm at the same salon herself. She went in for a regular perm and came out with an Afro puff, which prompted my father to call the salon and yell at them, asking, “How could you do this?” What can I say? The Coppock family has a lot of hair drama.

It’s nice to know that even my blonde mentor experienced some bumps and detours along the way to hair glory. My mother doesn’t have time to act as your personal hair mentor, dear reader—she’s got her hands full keeping me away from overconditioning. But she’s willing to share some of the tips that she has learned over the course of a lifetime of blondeness.

• Don’t be afraid to have one hairdresser cut your hair and another hairdresser color it. My mother has almost always had one person who does her cut and another who does her color. She has honed in on the specialty of a hairdresser and shopped around to get exactly what she wants. Sure, having one hairdresser do the cut and a colorist at a different salon do your color can be a time-consuming and expensive endeavor, but do you want good hair or not?
  
• Try, try, try to explain ashy vs. brassy so that you don’t end up on the wrong side of the blonde spectrum. As I mentioned before, my mother’s mother was a natural redhead—auburn hair and porcelain skin—so my mother has a lot of red in her pigment already, which can lead to brassy color if the colorist isn’t careful. If the color is too warm, my mother insists that her head looks like orange-yellow Velveeta cheese—not the look she wants. She likes her hair to be a sleek whitish blonde (unlike my preferred brassy shade), and when she tries out a colorist for the first time, she makes it a point to explain this difference and her own knowledge of her red pigmentation. When the colorist makes her adequately ashy, she looks fantastic. When the colorist somehow leads her to brassiness, poor Mom has a mac-and-cheese head.
  
• Bring a photo. Don’t feel corny pulling out a photo or magazine cutout. If you were having a pair of shoes dyed to exactly match your dress, you would bring a fabric swatch of the exact color, wouldn’t you? Well, your hair is no different—bring a point of reference. Also, please never do that matching dress-and-shoes combo—the 1980s are over.
  
• Follow a good hairdresser wherever he/she may go. Even if he/she talks too much. Finding a hairdresser who does your cut or color just the way you like it is a herculean task. So if you’re fortunate enough to find a good hairdresser, stick with her. Even if she chats more than you’d like. Even if she moves to a salon that’s an hour drive from your home—make the journey. Do you want convenience, or do you want hair that makes people do a double take? Once you find a good hairdresser, follow her to the ends of the earth.
  
• Don’t snap your gum. Doing that makes you look trashy. (For more of these gems, check out Chapter 11.)
  

Heed the wise words of my mother, Susan—a lifelong blonde, my icon of blondeness, and my invaluable blonde mentor.