This Afternoon In Drama

What's Pink And Orange and Pinkish-Orange All Over?

Despite being a huge narcissist, I'm often seized by the fantasy of not-existing.  The feeling of the disappearance, as imagined, is like being a Listerine strip on god's tongue.  I just fade and fade and fade until I've become a film so thin that I'm inseparable from what I dissolve onto.  Less a fly on the wall, I'm more a consciousness spread across that wall.  Fly gut residue.  But peaceful, you know.

Surely my longstanding attraction to the ombre effect has a lot to do with this fantasy.  Colors bleeding into one another until no one can figure out the point at which one ended and the next began.  Every once and awhile it makes a comeback in popular fashion and I find myself wanting everything, everywhere, as opposed to the times when every catalog shows leggings and ankle booties-- you will never see me in ankle booties-- and this spring happens to be one of those seasons, but ombre's pull on me has been constant and permanent and trendless.

So one night a few weeks ago, when I was feeling especially disappeary, I decided to make my hair ombre.  I started orange at the roots, segued into a reddish brown, and then finished with magenta.  The effect is clearer in natural sunlight than it is below:

Then almost immediately afterward started fixating once again on this Ralph Lauren comforter I'd been eying for months, except it was stupidly expensive at Bloomingdales, so I'd written it off:

And somewhat stupidly on my part, I began to wonder, what is it about this comforter that has me so entranced ?  Until I realized that if I flipped it vertically from how Ralph shows it in his packaging photo, it was the bedding equivalent of my hair.  I had to have it.  And I found one cheaper than four hundred dollars because it had some mysterious defect that I couldn't find (bedding, c'est moi?), and my fantasy began to get more specific.  Instead of this colorless disappearing I had been picturing before in my mind, my fade now went from a mandarin to magenta, the warmest, fuzziest version of becoming obsolete.

I saw myself lying in the bed, hair above me like a flame, self on and under matching fabric, one great swath of tropical sunset.  Saw myself being hard to see if one were walking into the room at that time of day.

And then I saw this (clearly, Ralph Lauren is similarly fixated), which is the only one I can find, and though it isn't my size:

I think I have to have it.  To go to bed in.  For bottoms I own a pair of hot pink bloomers with orange ribbon, which will have to do until I master the art of dip-dyeing.

Fading in terms of the blog has to do with getting ready to move and commencing work on the screen adaptation of a book, which I guess I'm not supposed to talk about because the company that holds the rights to the book isn't announcing the project yet.  But if you're quick with your one-eyed romantic leads, you can put it together...well, probably not.

Poor Aesthetic Decisions Made By Famous Blondes

I don't think it takes all that much to fuck with a baby's mind.  Fears are instantaneous and insurmountable; baby brains aren't all that known for their powers of perspective.  When I was somewhere around three or four, I saw my mom eating a bowl of Quaker oatmeal, went to sleep, and dreamt a creature made of instant cereal was scaling the side of my house.  It broke in through the second story window of my bedroom, and, taking a spoon to its side, scraped off a piece of itself, which it then force fed me.  That night I experienced a level of horror I hadn't known to exist.  And this fear persisted, eclipsing my sense of well-being even during the daytime.  I thought about that oatmeal monster constantly.  I discovered my mentally induced gag reflex.  I watched my mom's bowl of cereal with a profoundly untoddlerish sense of dread, waiting for its contents to congeal, organize into a sentient being, and make me its bitch.  I learned what it was to have a reoccurring nightmare.  And that this oatmeal monster persists in my adult memory as one of the guiding images of the first house I ever lived in says volumes to me about its tremendous sway over my psyche.  In fact, I was only able to start eating Quaker in 2007, it having apparently taken me a quarter century to process this trauma.

All I'm saying is the dumbest shit can really scare a kid.  So that Christina Aguilera decided it would be a fantastic idea to bring home the ELEVEN FOOT moon from her most recent concert tour and hover it in near proximity to her kid's crib initially struck me as a questionable parenting instinct.

And then I took a good look at that moon's face.  Imagine you're little Max Aguilera Bratman.  You've got a hazy field of vision and so far, your universe is a blur beyond the rosy nipples and soft globes of your mothers bountiful, enhanced breasts.   Before you know it, as weeks go by, your sight begins to lock into focus:

Hey, there's my friends, Mr. Lamby and Mr. Teddy on the easy chairs...hey, there's the pillowy shapes of the trees and the cloud and the hills on my mural...hey, there's my dad's droopy nice-Jewish-boy punim!  And then:

Holy shit, ma, there's a slice of evil fucking incarnate that looks as if it's decaying from the inside and trying to cover the stench of death and gangrene with hot tranny mess rouge!

The kid would be less scarred had she accessorized his room with the assless leather chaps from the Dirrrrrrty tour.  Poor aesthetic decision.  Less potentially psychologically damaging is Scarlett Johansson's new tattoo, which I keep waiting to learn is really a fake-out stunt for Ashton Kutcher's new meta-meta-Punk'd show, except he already had The Hills' Audrina tattoo her arm with Chinese characters advocating frying rice in pork fat, and the lameness of Scar-Jo's ink is both more subtle and more astonishing than I think the Kutch is capable of dreaming up.  (If the tattoo was a joke, then I replace this poor aesthetic decision made by a famous blonde with Carrie Underwood's Bride of Jessica McClintock styling during last night's "Idol Gives Back.")  I always say that choosing a tattoo is not about selecting a design that you think you'll always love, but instead about choosing one that accurately depicts the moment in which you got the work done, so that it's a mark in time and not a mark of identity.  And if Scarlett had gotten this ink done on the last day of Camp Wichi-Wachi when she was eleven so that she would never forget what great friends she had in Tikki-Takki cabin and the summer she learned to make lanyard keychains that twist, I would get it.  Compleeeeeetely.  But if Scarlett is currently at a place in her life where a kindergarten sun rises over the kind of ocean that usually accompanies a menage of Wyland dolphins (I was once there too), then she has no business putting out an album of Tom Waits covers.

 

About a month ago, my mom and I were in side-by-side dressing rooms at Loehmanns, and she wanted me to tell her if a certain pair of pin-striped jeans were making her ass look fat.  In a state of partial undress, I opened the door to see if the stripes were distorting that ass, forgetting the latest tattoo on my ribcage, now visible.  When my mom saw the ribcage, she sucked in her breath as a quiver took to her voice and asked, "What...is...that?" in the same voice used by one Abigail Breslin in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs when the aliens first started attacking her home.  "No, your ass doesn't look fat," I said, wanting to move past the issue, but my mom retreated to her dressing room where I heard sighing, more vocal quivering, and some crocodile tears for the next fifteen minutes.  I said, "It's not on you.  Get over it," when really I should have said, "It's not a technicolor circle of afternoon delight on my forearm; be grateful for that."

And my last poor aesthetic decision made by a famous blonde for the day:

This one needs no exploration.  The Bee Movie press tour haircut and its lingering aftermath are tragic.