|
I have never been one to worry about appearance. I was born with arrow-straight hair and a round face that is symmetrical and that has always been good enough for me. When I was small, my mother often tortured me with home perms in an effort to create a presentable child and the resulting effect was that as an adult I chose not to continue the process-- which may be why I like where I live so much. On Unalaska Island you can look like a hag all week and people won't care. One morning I was cleaning one of the local bars when the guy who stocks the beer cooler and liquor shelves came in and took off his hat. His hair was standing up in a bushy-looking mess. One of the bartenders had just arrived and I noticed his hair looked really bad as well. "Well!" I announced in a blithe tone of voice, "We must've all had our hair done at the same place!" The bartender looked at me in amazement and asked, "What, you don't like my hair?" And then proceeded to slick it back in a mocking manner. "What?" I asked him in the same incredulous tone, "You don't like mine?" When I worked on fishing boats I started to take an interest in my appearance, not because I was trying to attract a boyfriend, but because the environment was so saturated with testosterone I needed to do something to clear my psyche when we got to town by doing "typical female" things. This led to various experiments with hair color, one of which was a hue known by the mysterious sounding name, "black orchid." The hair dresser warned me that the color wouldn't actually make my hair purple, but that there would be something of a lavender glow around my head whenever my hair was struck with light from behind. I liked the results and after showing it off to whatever friends I could find in town I went back to my boat. I was working on the F/V Ballyhoo and we were in town for several days while waiting on repairs. We had a guest sleeping on our boat who was a deck hand on another boat owned by the same company. To help him save on hotel room fees we were letting him stay with us in a spare bunk until his boat came in. Our guest was a drunken fisherman, and he had been out the night before tying on a "big one" in celebration of his last days in port before hitting the high seas. When I came back to the boat our guest was out on deck trying to help the guys with some gear work, though I noticed he moved around rather gingerly and flinched whenever anyone shouted for something. I bounced onto the deck of the boat and surveyed the scene. I noticed our guest was looking at me in a funny way, and I thought it was because I had also had my hair permed and styled, so I looked very different. I looked at our engineer, who was staring at me, and asked, "Well, how do you like my new hair-do?" Our engineer is known for being very blunt and forthright in his comments. So I was not taken aback when he said, "The hair-do looks great! But is it supposed to be that color?" I started laughing and replied, "Yes, silly, don't you like it?" "Well yeah," said the engineer, "but I just wanted to make sure you meant for it to turn out that way." Our guest looked at me hard then. In a very careful tone of voice he asked, "What color is your hair?" I looked at him in amazement and said, "It's purple!" And then I asked him, "Can't you tell?" "OH THANK GOD!" our guest replied, melting with visible relief. "I thought I was seeing things. You looked like you had a halo!" Everyone on deck started laughing then. I didn't think about how my hair would look to a stranger, and because I had come on board with a purple nimbus shining around my head from the afternoon sun behind me, I had caused our guest to think he was suffering from DT's. He was ready to give up drinking until I let the cat out of the bag! If I had been thinking quickly that day I could have really had some fun with him.
Please remember to sign my Guestbook 
|
