Red High Heels

We ran away at Halloween when we were eleven years old.  Stephanie had decided that we could not just do the usual trick or treating in our two safe streets of Newark, New Jersey.  We had to go “beyond” the neighborhood to somewhere unfamiliar.   The well ordered streets of Newark where we lived turned to streets with large apartment buildings where it was not possible to knock on the door and chant our usual “trick or treat.”  These were streets that were more imposing, closer to the center of town with more traffic and department stores like Woolworths.   I prayed my parents would not worry or find out that we had broken awat from our neighborhood, Grumman Avenue, where we both lived.  

            We dressed in sexy, tight fighting clothes.   I usually wore baggy, muted shirts which would become my uniform as I got older and as my breasts developed. 

             Stephanie burst out of everything.   Her breasts bulged, her thighs were perfectly sculpted, and she enjoyed showing off her body.  She was one of the few eleven year old girls who actually had cleavage to show.  Boys loved her, adored her.  She was a risk taker, a seeker; I was the intellectual, the critic, and fearful.  I was infatuated with her and her chain smoking mother who wore equally sexy clothes, had bleached blonde hair and spoke in a sultry, sexy, smoker’s voice. 

             I was always “hiding” my full size breasts, yet with  Stephanie I dared to wear the kind of clothes that were more her style than mine.  We careened and wove our way through the streets of Newark in our red high heels and in our over the top sophisticated, much too adult kind of clothes in search of adventure.

             It was the first time I felt sexy and aware of my body and it was only because of  Stephanie that I dared exit my safety zone.  We were not only exiting our safe, well know neighborhood of Newark, but venturing forth into a more flirtatious, adult world.  We were budding women in our eleven year old bodies. 

            I envied her body: her calves were well developed and seemed to bulge with muscle and she knew how to reveal cleavage.   Stephanie was part “shiksa,” (Yiddish for not Jewish) since her mother was not Jewish, and while many of us in Newark were darker, and less svelte, her blonde hair and sexy body seemed more exotic than the rest of us.  The risk I took with  her that Halloween signaled the change in Newark as it was on the verge of exploding into violence and fires set throughout the city set by the black community in one of the infamous “riots” that swept the nation pre 1967.

            Newark pre 1967 riots was a middle class Jewish neighborhood that appeared ordinary.  I found refuge in our green and white house on Grumman Avenue playing in the street with neighborhood kids.  I felt safe in the elementary school on the main street which took up half the block. I knew every teacher by name.  I especially remembered my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Novack,   with her steel rimmed glasses and kind voice.  Her graham crackers and milk, and naps that followed, had been a cocoon before  the days when children would experience kindergarten as a pressure ridden class that decided the rest of your academic future.  In those days, we were still allowed to look forward to our snacks of graham crackers and milk and to our naps. 

            It felt deliciously taboo to follow Stephanie in her red high heels, blond hair, and sexy clothes with me in pursuit.   I would have followed her anywhere, not just through our Newark neighborhood of middle class homes.

            I have no memory of those streets, or how long we were away, or if my parents worried, and any consequences that followed for us as possible punishment.  As an eleven year old, I dared to dream of being out of the box and struggled for my need for safety while at the same time I yearned for adventure. 

            Stephanie became my mentor for a window into a world I was desperately curious about but not ready to enter.  It made sense, then, that she would designate me as a “timekeeper” for her and her boyfriend while they made out.   Sex is not always about having sex: it is about a feeling, a moment, a turning point, a visual.  That moment sitting a few feet away from Stephanie and her boyfriend on a roof as the evening turned dark and our parents had not called us to dinner yet, was an erotic moment.    I can still feel the summer breeze on the roof as they kissed in the twilight of the evening as I “kept time.”   Was I already the writer or sexual peeping Tom who observed and mentally recorded and documented rather than doing?

    Stephanie taught me about taking risks.  For someone like me, who was already a proverbial bookworm and full of existential” angst”;  I could vicariously be the “bad girl and  dress up in sexy outfits and run away.  I could allow myself to be anonymous on the brink of adult adventures.

             Stephanie and I lost touch after I moved from Newark to the suburbs. I moved to a street named “Pleasant Valley Way,” and the neat homes and basketball courts with well trimmed lawns and replaced the more urban, gritty streets of Newark.    Later, I heard that she became a teenage mother at seventeen.   She married her boyfriend and had a son.  I wondered how she felt about it:  being a single teenage mother in the sixties was still fairly outrageous and unconventional.   I wanted to talk to her, to ask her how it all worked out.  I wonder if she wanted to be me as much as I wanted to be her.

Shorn

This morning I looked into the mirror and slicked my hair back with my hands so that I looked bald, and thought, "I should shear my head." 

Fleeting thought.

Hours later I went to get a truckload of composted manure at a friend's. Her husband looked at me and said,

as if the fleeting thought was still visible above my head,

a cue for his part in the production:

"I should shear your head."

So I just had to let him.

Then he said, "You are pretty darn brave, Roach."

And we laughed.

And I felt good. I’d rather be considered brave than beautiful.

Later my boss said,

“What happened, did you get your head caught in a lawn mower?”

 

And I still feel good.

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There is a moment, in canoeing...

Must be extreme canoeing, because it's not

anything I have ever experienced or

I''d be all done canoeing...

It's called a "horizon drop"

meaning, all of a sudden, you can't--

you just cant see the river, it has

dropped away from you, and until

you get to the edge of that drop, you

don't know how far you might fall.

The dilemma is: do you get out and walk along the bank

safe and dry, and check out that drop before you get there?

Or do you trust the map, the guidebook, the guy you met

around the campfire last night, that this is just part of the fun...

you might break a bone, but you won't die,

and you will have such a story at tomorrow night's campfire.

Raising children is one long string of horizon drops, that's

what I think.  Only it's not you that might be trapped at the bottom of the falls

slowly drowning in the furious bubbles...

It's not you who might be sailing, singing, over the rapids...

It's that little beast who has made every day a day of worry

interrupted by moments of creation-worthy joy.

And who are you to say, "portage, you must porTAGE" or

hell, go for it, you only live once...either could be such bad advice.

You are no better than that drunken camper you toasted the stars with last night

Except, you are all bound up with love, and so

here you go, or don't go.

Already, you have been so brave. 

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I was born with long, curly, flowing hair, my mother chopped it all off and ruined my life.  That’s not entirely true, but that is the story I told myself for years.  There are pictures of me as a toddler with curly, long hair.  I was so pretty and girly at the age of 2.  The story told to me by my mother says that those cute, girly curls were a bear to get a comb through.  Even going through bottles of “Johnson’s No More Tangles”, I would scream and cry as she pulled on my curly, tangled hair.  (I don’t remember that part.)  So one day, she just couldn’t take it anymore and got out the scissors.  It was finally short – and straight (the curls had only been on the ends of the hair).  And that is how it stayed for the next 20 years.

 I think I was in kindergarten the first time it happened: an older kid at school looked at me and asked “Are you a girl or a boy?” I had never been more embarrassed or more angry.  Because he was right.  No one knew my gender.  Girls were supposed to have long hair and wear dresses; boys wore pants and had short hair.  How else would you know who was who?  Even hours and hours of watching “Free to Be You and Me” couldn’t convince me that girls – pretty girls anyway – should have short hair.  Well, I concluded, maybe I can’t have long hair, but I can dress like a girl.  And I made a vow right then and there to always dress like a girl. 

I spent all of first grade in a dress.  Or a skirt.  Or the one pink polyester pantsuit I had.  Rain or shine, all through the Minnesota winter, walking to school every day in tights.  I was determined that no one would EVER mistake me for a boy.  My mother tried to make me part my hair on the side, rather than in the middle where it had been for a long time.  Part my hair on the side just like my brother’s hair!  I would have none of it.  I was old enough to refuse that at least!

 It was clear from television and movies.  Long hair was the way to go.  All of the pretty women on TV had long hair.  I watched Charlie’s Angels religiously.  The cast consisted of the pretty blonde, the pretty brunette, and the ugly but smart one, who had short hair.  I gazed longingly at Princess Leia with her braided buns, knowing that it took a LOT of long hair to make those braids.  I loved Little House on the Prairie, and was fascinated when Laura became a teacher.  Her outward sign of adulthood was that she took her long hair, which had always hung straight down on her shoulders, and put it up into a very grown-up bun. With little ringlets on the side of her face.  She was so pretty. 

 The ‘80’s happened when I was in Junior High.  All the popular (read: pretty) girls had big, bouncy, curly hair.  Now, ever since “the big cut” at age two, my hair had been straight as an arrow.  This clearly would not work for me when I turned 13.  I started getting permanents.  My mother tried to perm my hair at home at first.  She put a bunch of curlers on my head, willy-nilly, and started to apply the ammonia solution.  I gagged.  My eyes watered. I felt like I couldn’t breathe!  But the thought of curly hair kept me going.  At the end, when she took out the rollers…nothing had changed.  The curls fell out as soon as my hair dried.  I was heart-broken.  I wept and wailed. How could I go back to Oak Land Jr. High with this terrible straight hair?!?  My mother finally relented and took me to a professional stylist for the perm.  Images of Blair from “The Facts of Life” and Morgan Fairchild went through my head as the stylist rinsed out the curlers that had been pulling on my head for a half-hour.  Then we went back to the mirror.  My hair was definitely curly…like a brunette version of Little Orphan Annie.  Tight, kinky curls that I couldn’t brush out were plastered to my head.  Once again, I thought, I looked like a boy.  My dreams of being popular were dashed.

Not much later, no one would ever mistake me for a boy again.  I started developing womanly “assets”, and I learned how to work the perms that I got continually.  I spent hours in front of the mirror with curling iron in hand – 2 different sizes of curling irons – and a big bottle of hairspray.  I finally got my hair to do something resembling what I wanted.  It still wasn’t long, but at least it was big.

In the ‘90’s, styles changed (as styles are wont to do), and I was able to let go of my perms.  Instead, I experimented with color: blonde, red, and that unfortunate period of jet-black hair which certain people will not let me forget.  I also started to grow my hair out for the first time.  I was elated when I could actually put it up in a pony-tail.  Although as it got longer and longer, I started to see that long hair was a lot of work and ended up with it in a pony-tail more often than not.

When I hit my 30’s, I began working professionally as an actor.  The main tool I have as an actor is my “headshot”.  It is my calling-card.  It is the first thing I do at an audition: hand the director my headshot.  And the most important rule of auditioning is: Always Look Like Your Headshot.  So I finally developed a personal hair style.  I settled on a bright red color that I had to touch up every 6 weeks, because reds fade fast.  And I had lovely shoulder-length straight hair with long bangs.  I felt pretty, I felt feminine.  And after moving to a new city, everyone thought of me that way: with long red hair.  I was content.

Then, a bomb-shell dropped in June of 2010.  I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  When I received the diagnosis, I sobbed from the shock of it, and as the nurse practitioner told me about my options for treatment, it became clear that I was going to have to get chemotherapy.  My hand instinctively went to my hair, and the nurse practitioner saw it.  “Yes,” she sighed, “We might be able to save your breast, but I’m sorry,  you will probably lose your hair.” More tears flowed.

I became determined to beat the disease.  I learned all I could about breast cancer.  I spent hours on the internet researching.  I bought dozens of books about how to cope, and I embarked on my year of cancer treatments.  After weeks of tests, it was determined that I could keep my breast and have a lumpectomy: a surgery during which they just take out the tumor, but leave the rest of the breast intact.  I was relieved and went through the surgery without many problems.  I was sent home to heal for a month before I started on the chemo.  I was to have 4 ½ months of chemotherapy and a full year of another I.V. treatment called Herceptin.

I became more and more convinced that I could live and thrive.  I found a website called “Bald is Beautiful” which had dozens of pictures of beautiful bald women.  And not beautiful in that “oh, isn’t she strong, as you feel sorry for her” type of beautiful.  These women were seriously HOT!  I had read in all my research that when the hair falls out, long hair can sometimes be uncomfortable.  And having watched many made-for-TV movies about women with cancer where they stand sobbing in front of the mirror as they brush their hair and clumps fall off in the hairbrush, I decided to take the bull by the horns.  I was going to decide when I lost my hair, not the chemo.  So several days after my first treatment, I went to an acquaintance who was a hair stylist, and had her shave my head.

My first instinct was to put on a brave face despite my fear that I would look like an old man, and Shelley, the stylist, tried to make the afternoon as fun as possible.  I took a deep breath when she got out the clippers and took the first swipe.  There was no turning back now.  My beautiful red hair floated quietly to the ground, and I realized I was free.  I even started to have fun, and a friend took pictures. Eventually I became the punker I had always seen when she shaved me down to a mohawk.  And finally just down to my bangs.  Then it was gone.  The most amazing part was that all of the other stylists in the salon kept coming by and telling me how beautiful I looked.  “Oh, you have a perfectly shaped head!” They cried, and “Your eyes are so blue.”  Or “I can’t believe how gorgeous you are without hair!  You should have done this years ago!”  Shelley washed my head to get the little hairs off of me and I looked in the mirror. 

I had to admit, I looked way better than I ever would have believed before this experience.  I had brought a pretty blue scarf and she showed me how to tie it around my head.  We took a picture, and I was….well….beautiful. Getting rid of all that hair left me with just me.  There was nothing to hide behind.  No distraction of long red hair.  I had believed that my long red hair was what made me beautiful, and for the first time in my life I realized what made me beautiful was that I was my SELF.  There was no one else in this world like me.  I was strong and resilient, I was facing down a terrifying illness and I had faced it head on by shaving my head.  There was going to be no more running away from who I naturally was.

It sounds strange, but as I write this, exactly one year after that day shaving my head, as I sit here with short, straight hair that I absolutely love, I am actually grateful for the cancer.  It is not something I would want for anyone else. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but I have learned so much about myself.  About my capacity for acceptance, my ability to recognize and receive love, and about the peace that lies inside myself.  I know now that everything will be alright, no matter what happens next, and no matter how my hair grows.

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When I was nine years old, one day my mother made an offhanded remark about how ugly I was. 

Before that day, I loved to sing, act, write, dance -- for as long as I can remember, since I was three years old at least. After that day, all that mattered to me was being seen as physically beautiful, or, failing that, desirable because I possessed some undeniable talent, or, failing that, becoming so famous that I would no longer be invisible - I wanted to be seen, appreciated, which for me meant that I would be loved.  

For me, “ugly” meant “worthless.”

I sang, but the thought “you are ugly” would cause my voice to falter and crack, and eventually I stopped singing. I danced, but the thought “you are ugly,” underlined every gesture I made, and when my dance teacher praised me and encouraged me to become a professional choreographer, I didn’t believe her. I wanted to act, but I convinced myself that I was too ugly to ever work as an actor, and I ran off to Paris, abandoning the last thing that gave me joy.

I spent an inordinate amount of energy and time trying to be beautiful, wishing I were beautiful, hoping that someone would find me beautiful.  I spent too much money on clothes, makeup, and fashion magazines.  I spent a lot of time hating the way I looked.

Then one day, in desperation, and realizing that life is indeed too short to live unhappily, I decided to give acting a true try.

That was twelve years ago. I have not achieved success as an actor, not by the common definition of the word, but I remind myself when I am low that I have done more than I could have imagined thirteen years ago. And that at least I gave it a shot.

Some years ago, I had misplaced the passport I had when I ran off to Paris twenty years ago. Last year I found it, and when I looked at my passport photo, I was stunned. I was beautiful, and never knew.  I was beautiful, simply because I was.

What is more, all these years I was so focused on my face that I was blind to true beauty, the only kind that lasts, and the beauty that is truly seen, appreciated, and makes one beloved. This beauty has many faces: kindness, generosity, honesty, courage, humor, devotion, selflessness, love... You will add more to the list as you live your lives, I am certain. Just know, that you are worthy, simply because you are. Embrace your life, and love yourself.