Gettin' Gatsbyfied

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 

So I am going to this wedding in a couple of weeks, and the bride is a very dear friend of the family. She is loud, and foul-mouthed, and complicates things endlessly. She is also generous to a fault, loyal, hilariously funny and loving to the point where she would without question take a bullet for anyone in our family. You take the good, you take the bad, and we love her, so here we are. 

 

Our friend likes to live large. She is an event planner, so naturally, her wedding has become a huge event. It is a 1920s themed wedding, being held at an art deco landmark LA hotel, and she has asked that all her guests dress in 1920s themed attire. I have been looking online at 1920s beaded dresses and found one I LOVE (a reproduction) for $400. Well, that is not going to happen in this current scenario. So I have decided to do a modern interpretation of the theme, and today I bought this:

 

Image courtesy of Bloomingdales

 

In the 1920s, dresses had little to no definition at the waist:

Image from Vintage Dancers - go check out the site, it's cool.





I bought a kind of art deco looking belt to slap around that bad boy and we'll see how that looks. I am going to wear long strings of pearls or perhaps a tassel necklace, depending on what I can find, and probably some 1920s shoes from Modcloth. I may try to set my hair in finger curls - will let you know how that turns out (I've been watching tutorials on YouTube).

 

So okay, I am getting all that together, feeling pretty good. And then today I received an email from the friend, saying that she is putting together a performance AT the wedding, and she is asking selected couples who have what she describes as successful marriages to participate. She wants me, as one-half of one of those couples, to lip-sync a song to Sweet Dub in the middle of the reception at this HUUUUUGE wedding. Holy Jesus!

 

You know what? My first reaction was to say no...so I said yes. Totally outside of my comfort zone, and I might embarrass the hell out of myself, but I'm going to do it. It will be a complete surprise to Sweet Dub and he will love that.

 

I get to pick the song. I am thinking I might do a Josephine Baker or Edith Piaf song. Or, in keeping with the theme, there's always Fergie:

 

I kid, I kid. But I do like her manicure here. And by the way:  song suggestions welcome!

 

Last Minute Me

I have to attend a wedding this weekend and (of course) I have nothing to wear that fits/is appropriate for a fall evening wedding, so I have been trolling about on various websites to see if I can find something I like. In a classic case of champagne taste on a beer budget, I found this:



I love it, but it's $198. Can be bought at Nordstrom if you are so inclined. As for me...I gotta keep on looking.

Don't get me started on shoes.

Long as God Can Grow it

You haven’t heard from me in a while, I know. I should write some kind of treatise about work-life balance, about making time for creative pursuits, about this completely messed-up capitalist system that we have all been suckered into, or I might even write about six bad work habits and how to correct them so you can streamline your day, maximize your time, reach optimum productivity and all kinds of hooptedoodle.

Okay, well, not doing that today. I have serious problems.

I used to have a giant mane of curly unruly hair:

  

It took years for me to learn how to deal with it, to embrace it as uniquely mine. But every now and then (every five years or so) I get tired of dealing with it. There is SO MUCH of it. I could knit a sweater for a cat with all the hair I shed every day, which would be a completely pointless exercise, but honestly, sometimes I get tired of dealing with the sheer bulk of it. And then I find myself thinking about cutting it into a bob, or even (lured by pics of Halle Berry or Eva Pigford - oops now Eva Marcille), a cute little curly pixie, like so:

 

 
 
So last fall I cut it all off, right before Thanksgiving. And I liked it. And here’s the thing:  I have a lot of hair, and it grows really fast. If I wanted to have short hair, I had to commit to a regular schedule of haircuts. That quickly grew tiresome, and I missed being able to put my hair up, or back, or whatever.

Now I am growing it out. And I have middle-aged mom hair. And I hate it.

The standard advice here when you’re growing out your hair and are in the unhappy middle stage is to do something fun like coloring it. Oh, but that would be too easy. At the same time I cut my hair, I committed to no longer coloring it. I turned 45 a couple of weeks ago, and you know what? I think it is perfectly reasonable for someone my age to go gray.

The combination of the silver coming in and the hair growing out means I am doubly unhappy with this middle stage. My hair does not lie down until it gets long and the weight of it stretches the curl out a bit, so right now it is just growing up, stretching toward the sky, and it won’t be tamed. It is long enough to look like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

or maybe this:  

 

And yet it doesn’t look like that, not anywhere close.  I am not a high-maintenance person. I am a big fan of the “five minute face,” and my hair styling routine pretty much takes about five to ten minutes in the morning. I am struggling with hair bands and headbands and little clips and such. All this to say: not feeling quite the kickass glamour goddess these days.

Poor little me, I know. But we’ve all been there. I am trying my best. A wise person once said it’s not what’s on your head but what’s underneath. I’m working on that, too.

 

 

 

Summer, summer, summertime…

It’s summer, and that means it will be hot.

If it’s hot, there will be swimming.

If there’s swimming, hair gets wet.

If hair gets wet and you are the parent of the person who’s swimming, that means your kid’s hair dries out.

If, furthermore, you are the parent of a black girl, that means you have to deal with the question of whether or not to get your child’s hair “braided up” for summer.  Perhaps your cornrowing skills are not up to par, or perhaps you don’t feel up to a five-hour marathon braiding session.
 
If you consult your mother-in-law on this (who is not against the hot comb, on which you have agreed to disagree, so there’s your baseline right there), she will tell you to take your child to her stylist to let her cornrow your child’s hair and “add some hair.”

Barring this, she will tell you to “grease up that child’s head” with “that green grease” to protect it from the chlorine, the drying out, and the fuzziness.

You may, at this point, bite your tongue and just flat twist your child’s hair up against her head and hope for the best. Get yourself a glass of lemonade and kick back. It’s your summer too, after all.

Frowny Face

This morning I was sitting in a ballroom listening to a talk on the neurophysiology of empathy. The presenter stated that one of the major factors involved was facial feedback.  Basically, however your face is arranged impacts how you feel—your mood, and even your respiration and your posture. The example she gave was when you are talking with someone and their face is scrunched up in an expression of distress, you subconsciously do the same, and that this impacts you physiologically. She told a very interesting story: research shows that injection of Botox into the area between the eyebrows, where people typically get a frown line, has been shown to reduce depression. Because you can’t physically frown, it impacts your mood!

This is fascinating to me. Not that I’m going to run out and get Botox, but simply because I never really thought about this at this level and yet it makes sense. How many times have you heard from self-help gurus something along the lines of “fake it ‘til you make it” or “act as if?” The idea is that no matter how you feel, if you put a smile on your face and act as if everything’s great, you create that reality. It becomes a self-fulfilling action. Naturally, if you have a serious mental health disorder, this is not going to cut it. But for most people, often times it’s just a matter of a shift in attitude. Take a minute and regulate your breathing, relax your face (unfurrow your brow!), and you are going to feel better. 

Now, I must have missed the flap about this research when it first came out—and having delved into it now, it turns out that the doctor who conducted this research only used ten patients as subjects, nine of whom were allegedly depression-free two months after treatment, so it’s hardly an authoritative study.

  

But anecdotally around the web, a number of people have come forward to state that while they got Botox for cosmetic reasons, they noticed two unexpected side effects: the first, a lifting of what had previously been a lengthy depression; and the second, a reduction in headaches, including migraines.

Okay, that all sounds pretty great, but then there are the cons, among them: facial paralysis. Thanks, but no. Others have said Botox seems to suppress certain emotional responses. How can that be healthy? It seems like if you were sad and wanted to cry, but couldn’t, it would be toxic to your insides. 

Well, I think I’ll be keeping my frown line and just try to be more mindful not to scowl while squinting at my screen. How about you?

I May Have to Concede

Having just purchased a box of haircolor to cover my roots, I look in the mirror and conclude I am fighting a losing battle.

Is there a way to gracefully go gray? Discuss.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Pampering Myself (and not with Diapers)

I took a few days off a couple of weeks ago (calling it a vacation seems a bit disingenuous, since we didn’t go anywhere and since I spent most of it working hard corralling the kids without the help of my husband). On one of the days when Viva was in camp and Ceeya was at daycare, I took 3.5 hours at a new salon to get my hair colored. Call me shallow, vain, whatever, but baby, I felt like a new woman when I walked out of there. My new colorist, April, was sweet and down to earth and my hair looks exactly its natural color. I mean exactly.

My hair is very thick and resistant to color, so whenever I color it takes forever. Somehow she managed to cover most of the silver hairs that were cropping up (I did find a few strays here and there later) and she also managed to duplicate not only my natural light brown hair but also the lighter highlights that naturally occur. I’m not sure exactly what went down in the salon—I may have made promises I couldn’t keep, something about free tickets to the Cayman Islands or something, it’s all a bit foggy in my memory, but you know, whatever I said, she hooked me up and my hair looks better than it has in recent memory.

I was thinking, as I walked out, how difficult it is for me to do this kind of thing with any regularity, but how easily it made me feel better about myself. And feeling better about myself makes me better in every other aspect of my life (cue cheesy music here, I mean could I BE more predictable). Sorry for the cliché, but for reals, it’s one small thing that makes a big difference.

Take care of yourselves out there. Give pampering a chance!

Kinky

Hair style is the final tip-off whether or not a woman really knows herself.
- Hubert de Givenchy, Vogue, July 1985

I think I need a haircut.

My hair is getting really long and I’m tending again toward my cop-out hairdo of pulling my wet hair into a simple ponytail and letting it air dry on my way to work (which it doesn’t, because I have really thick hair). As Viva says, “That is not a hairstyle, Mom.”

What a journey my hair has been over the years. I know that many women agonize over their hair, but the journey seems particularly fraught for those of us with super-hyper curly hair—and those of us whose ancestry has at least some passing acquaintance with Africa get the double whammy of having hair that is simply not a part of the mainstream standard of beauty.

My guilty pleasure (well, one of them) is watching What Not to Wear. But after watching it for a while (and honestly I watch it much less than I used to—I watched it every morning when I was on medical leave a couple of years ago), the segment where they would do the hair makeover started to bug me, because invariably whenever they came across someone with curly or even wavy hair, they would blow it straight. “Sleek and sophisticated,” they would gush.

I call bullshit on that. You mean you are going to teach someone how to completely change their wardrobe to look better and feel better about themselves, but you are going to tell them that the way their hair looks growing naturally out of their heads is not okay? It’s perplexing, because so often hosts Stacy and Clinton preach the message of fit: know your body, accept the shape you have, and dress to compliment your unique shape. They never say you have to lose 50 pounds, or your legs are too short, or your shoulders are too broad. They’re all about working with what you have. And then the hair stylist comes in and gives the woman straight hair. I say: teach them how to style their curls! Teach them to love their hair as it is!

I digress, but only because it is related to my personal hair mantra, which is: It’s all about self-acceptance. And again, working with what you have. When I was a kid, my mom got so frustrated with trying to braid my hair that when I was about 9, she finally just cut it all off—without even asking me first. I then got mistaken for a boy all the time for a couple of years there, because she kept cutting it. This actually was fine with me most of the time because I was a total tomboy, climbing trees and playing Six Million Dollar Man, and I wouldn’t wear a dress if you paid me.

When I hit middle school, my hair had grown out enough that I went back to having a wet set (ecch, can you imagine) every Sunday. By high school, curling irons were it. My hair might not be straight, but at least it was in smooth, big curls. Near the tail end of high school, I cut it all off very short and wore my hair natural in a light brown/dark blonde afro and since it was the 80s, with very thick blue eyeliner. Oh, my.

By the time I hit college, I’d discovered relaxers. No one in my family ever used them, so I had no personal experience with them. I never thought they would work on my hair, but at some point a friend suggested I use one to texturize my hair, so it would still be curly, but grow down, not out. I used them with some success throughout my 20s. During this time, people would tell me how gorgeous my hair was. Are you kidding? Never in my life had I ever thought my hair was pretty. And here I was, with this giant curly head of hair, learning how to use leave-in conditioners and actually enjoying how my hair looked, floating halfway down my back.

By the time I hit 30, I was very happy with my hair and stopped relaxing it. I also became something of a hair product junkie and began falling in love with sites like nappturality and naturallycurly.com. One day, I was walking down Robertson Blvd. in Beverly Hills and a man in a convertible flagged me down. He complimented me on my hair and in the same breath said he was looking for models to be on a show about a Japanese hair straightening system. Would I be interested?

“How long does it last?” I asked.

“About six months,” he said.

“Even when you wet it?” I said.

“Yeah, you won’t believe it,” he enthused.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m all about the self-acceptance.” And I kept walking.

All about the self-acceptance…except, it seems now, when it comes to white hair.* Get me to a colorist, stat!

Apparently I’ve still got some work to do.

* I’m not going gray, I’m going white. I think it’ll look cool when I’m 50, but I’m not there yet.

Hair Advice, Please!

[Before we begin, apologies: last week I was out of the blogosphere for family issues. Early in the week, I got a call from daycare that my little one had pinkeye, which is highly contagious, so I had to keep her out of daycare for a bit, and then on Thursday my grandma was taken to the hospital with what turned out to be pneumonia, so I was out of town/away from the computer Friday and Saturday as well. Highlight of the trip: I arrive at the hospital with my sister and all of our kids. It has taken 4 hours since I got to town to get all the kids together and get to the hospital. I am trying to remain on an even keel. Less than 60 seconds into the hospital room, my grandmother says: “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were two months pregnant.” WHAT? Who says that? What does it even mean?! How can anyone look two months pregnant?! But, I digress.]

I have several things I want to write about, but what is most urgent is this: my current hair routine with Viva is that I wash her hair on Sunday, comb it out and oil it and style it for the week. She sleeps with a sleep cap, so most mornings I just have to oil it a bit, smooth back the edges and maybe tighten a few twists here and there – put in different color clips or barrettes and she’s good to go. A few years ago I went to Snapaholics.com and at the time they had elasticized sleep caps for sale. These basically look like a cloth swim cap – machine washable and hold up well, but I would like to order more. Ay, there’s the rub. Snapaholics no longer carries them! AAAAAGH!

I emailed them just now to find out what happened. Doubly frustrated because the owner went through some monstrous move and the website was down for some time, so I was happy to log on this morning and see it was up – but no sleep caps! Of course I then went online to see if there is anywhere else that carries them and I came across this concept: using stretchy book covers for the same purpose (you put them on and then knot at the nape of the neck). I guess it would work. It seems a little strange, but I guess it would work.

Any other ideas? I’ve tried bandannas but even when they are clipped to her head, Viva is such an active sleeper that they come off.

Thanking you in advance…

Decidedly Unfunky

I am in the midst of a clothes funk. Ecch, my clothes. Why are they all so hateful?

Added to that, the family has booked a trip to Maui in June. I know, I know, all I should need is two pairs of shorts, a few T-shirts, some flip-flops and the sunscreen. And a hat. Wait, I just re-read that sentence and realized I didn’t even think to include bathing suits. What does that tell you?

Summer is coming! I want to spend the entire summer looking fabulous in cute little sundresses all in bright citrus-y shades. With adorable little strappy sandals! Alas, my budget does not allow for this. I need to buy clothes for my children. They insist on growing, which is completely inconsiderate of them and certainly something which I will never let them live down.

I have a friend who always looks completely fabulous. (Maybe it’s you!) I always want to ask where she gets her clothes. She is at least 10-12 inches taller than I and always wears amazing high-heeled shoes. I mean, her shoes are like a party in and of themselves. She can rock short hair or she can rock cornrowed braids (the look she is currently rocking). She could probably shave her head and look abso-fricking-gorgeous. She is just one of those peeps who has a presence. I have a little bit of a girl crush on her.

She, like me, has two small kids. I don’t know how she does it. I love her, and while I’m all about the self-acceptance I do occasionally feel kind of short and frumpy around her. Now, I do own a mirror and I am aware that most people of the adult sort are, indeed, taller than I am. I embrace my shortness. I just don’t embrace feeling frumpy dumpy.

I realize there are more important things to worry about. So many more important things to worry about – and I do. But I feel the need to jazz myself up a bit. And maybe that will make me able to tackle some of those more important issues. Like, Viva telling me last night that she was mad at God. My 6-year-old is having existential angst! Is it any wonder that I just want to fixate on my closet?

Lucky Thirteen.

Appreciating, on this thirteenth day of appreciating what I should appreciate:

1. I finally, after MONTHS of not, got my hair cut and colored on Saturday. I feel like a new woman!

2. New red shoes. HOT!

3. A quiet day at the office. I finished drafting my cover article, including sidebars and suggesting which photos to use.

4. Really good news from Sweet Dub's job. Apparently they appreciate him almost (ALMOST) as much as I do.

5. Jon Stewart taking on Jim Cramer. One love, Jon. One love.

Fashion Crisis

Oh Lord. I have to go to a cocktail event tomorrow night and I don't know what I'm going to wear. I have two maternity dresses but they are very much more business-y than dressy. Since I left this until the last minute, I can't order anything online and I fear I'm going to end up spending an outrageous amount of money for something I'll wear only a couple of times. Crap.

I really dislike myself sometimes.

Updated to add: Okay, so I ended up looking pulled together, if not glam. I bought this quite non-dressy dress at GapMaternity:



And I spruced it up with a pretty sheer apple green wrap, some dangly multi-colored chandelier earrings, a couple of green and gold bangles, and these A. Marinelli peep-toe pumps:



I also wore my hair down and finger-curled little ringlets into it. Since I didn't take a picture, you're going to have to take my word for it, but I think I cleaned up pretty good.

Buh-bye, Sweatpants!

The other day, Sweet Dub looked at me critically and with some mild concern and said:

"Those pants make your ass look flat. [pause] I didn't think that was even possible."

His comments were directed at the evil sweatpants. I'm back in regular clothes. My ass is now swathed in denim and looking pretty good (read: not flat), if I do say so myself. I think we should burn the sweatpants in our backyard.

Except we have once again been issued a high-wind advisory. I'd hate to contribute to the wildfire epidemic.

Damn Santa Anas.