March 26, 2010
Starting on the Outside
I doubt I’ll ever know her name but I need to thank an elderly clerk at a high-end discount store for changing my life.
In November 2008, I was shopping for a dress for the company holiday party at this store. I searched the racks then headed for the dressing room, arms loaded with just about every holiday dress I saw in my size. When I returned a stack of black dresses to the dressing room’s holding rack, the clerk there asked about one of them. I told her it had fit but looked more suited to a funeral, not a party. She said – kindly – that I needed to dress my age.
My age? She’d laid down the gauntlet. At 48, I was young and intended to act it. Now, I wouldn’t have worn something like a short, short skirt except on a beach or in the privacy of my own home, but I didn’t want rules about “my age.”
The mirror revealed the story. I had mousy grey-brown hair, hadn’t plucked my eyebrows since Brooke Shields made that acceptable in what, the 80′s?, and generally only wore makeup for special events.
Not a pretty picture.
I found the perfect dress – at a chic store – then, the night before the party, had my hair colored. I’d never even had highlights before so this was a bold move. I really wanted to go red but since I’d been blonde as a child thought that was far safer with my coloring. The color went wrong in this exclusive salon, my very qualified beautician wasn’t sure why, and the blonde came out the color of brass. (Not brassy, brass.) New color with highlights on top – no charge – and the accident produced a red blonde color. I was now a sassy redhead and loving it. With eyebrows plucked and makeup ramped up, the new me was ready to meet the world.
For some reason, when we change our outside, it can have a profound effect about how we feel on the inside. I know I felt like a new person and went after life in a new way. (I’ll blog about this later but mention here that my life changes include a man, now my husband.)
Thank you little lady.
Challenge:Take a good look in the mirror. Have you made any changes lately? Is your hairstyle the same one you had when Bush #1 was president? The big question is: are you happy with what you see?
Change can be easy. And fun.
Carol said,
March 31, 2010 at 6:10 pm
I recently began coloring my hair again. I started going gray in my very early thirties and have always been a little self conscious about it. But last November when I was visiting a coworker who’d just delivered her first child and the nurse asked if I was the grandmother I decided to cover my gray. I’m only 45 and while physiologically old enough to be the grandmother of that baby, I would have been in my teens when Mom was born and barely adolescent when Dad was born. I feel much better about myself without the gray hair.