The New Rules for Blondes (14 page)

So remember our strategy: Talk about topics that you know about (when possible), and if that isn’t an option, drop some million-dollar vocabulary words. If you still feel overwhelmed by a conversation, then it’s time to heed the advice oft-repeated maxim “Better to remain quiet and seem a fool than to open your mouth and erase all doubt.”

CHAPTER 13

RULE:
Be Mindful of the Attention that Blonde Attracts

B
londe hair is undeniably eye-catching. As Anita Loos wrote in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
back in 1925, “Gentlemen always seem to remember blondes.” There’s a reason that Madonna and Lady Gaga—the two most in-your-face, attention-craving, envelope-pushing performers of the past few decades—are natural brunettes who switched to blonde: Blonde is what gets attention. Pale hair reflects light and catches the eye. But make no mistake—that attention is of both the positive and negative variety.

The adjective “blonde” is a loaded descriptor. You rarely hear someone described as “great with children, really generous, blonde, thoughtful,” and so on. The adjective “blonde” is usually paired with “dumb” or “leggy” or “bombshell.” Take the quick (but telling) mention of a blonde character in the song “Amen” by the country trio Edens Edge. This song is about the singer’s elation that her crush has finally escaped from a bad relationship. The lyrics go: “I heard Mary Jane down at the Powder Puff Beauty Shop / Sayin’ that blonde in her tube top / She left our Jimmy for a boy in Illinois / Someone give me an amen.” The song goes on to say how both her crush’s mother and the entire town are relieved that he finally woke up to the evil of the blonde in the tube top. Of course the Beelzebub character is a blonde in a tube top! What else would she be? We’d never hear a description of this evil heartbreaker as a “brunette in a tube top”—it just doesn’t pack the same punch as an evil blonde in a tube top. This widespread disdain for the sexy blonde is fueled by the perception that blondes have it easy: They’re (somehow universally considered to be) clueless (so others take care of things for them, which makes them . . .), spoiled, and entitled, plus they get all the attention.

But this blonde quandary is a chicken-or-egg question: Are blondes universally prejudged and hated because they get so much attention, or do blondes get so much attention because of these universal prejudgments and assumptions?

To explore this question within the world of Internet surfing, I reached out to professional web-click maximizer (and brilliant storyteller) Jeff Simmermon. He shared with me some interesting information about how blondes catch the eye and get positive attention online. Jeff used to work in AOL’s Communities section, which was essentially a precursor to today’s social media. On this site, people would have forum discussions and read articles. It was Jeff’s job to manage those forums and maximize clicks on AOL’s web content. AOL’s research-and-development department studied how to maximize these clicks and gathered a ton of data about the online behavior of visitors to websites. This data was aggregated across the United States, the world, and millions of different web pages. It revealed what items, pages, or pictures people tend to click on or interact with more than others. Based on these findings, Jeff organized AOL’s home pages a certain way as far as imagery, articles, text placement, and so on. The findings were this: If you have an article that you want people to read, you must post some sort of a photo along with the headline. That is, links to articles that included a photograph “viewed better” (got more clicks) than links to articles that were simply text (just the title of the article). So photos seem to draw web surfers to an article—OK. But AOL’s findings dug much deeper. Just one step further, the data shows that photos of people get more clicks than photos of other items (still lifes, landscapes). To go another step, photos of women get more clicks than photos of men. (Let’s take for granted that the models in these photos are all extremely good-looking.) And further still, photos of blonde women get the most click traffic—more than photos of beautiful women with any other hair color. Beyond all of that, photos of celebrities get even more click traffic than anything. So web designers’ formula for maximizing click traffic is to find a reason, any reason, to post a photo of a blonde female celebrity.

So, for example, if AOL had an article called “What to Know Before Saying ‘I Do,’ ” they might want to put a photo of a blonde Jessica Simpson with text to draw a thin connection between the article and the photo, perhaps something like “Jessica and her man should read this one!” This photo of a blonde female celebrity would maximize clicks on an article that isn’t actually related to Jessica Simpson at all. So you see, blonde hair catches eyes on the computer screen. But it isn’t limited solely to the digital world—it also happens in the real world. And, as we touched on before—this eye-catching can be of the positive or the negative variety. As Voltaire (and Stan Lee and FDR and Churchill) supposedly said, with great power comes great responsibility. And nowhere is that adage more applicable than in the world of blondeness. Blonde power should be wielded wisely, for it can have catastrophically bad or stunningly good results. I have experienced both bad and good things as a result of my blondeness.

I certainly have gotten some useful attention or perks as a result of my light hair. I’ve had many nights out with pals when a guy would come over and chat me up, specifically, when I’m out with a mix of ladies. Some guys have even admitted that my hair caught their eye so they thought they’d buy me a drink or introduce themselves. On a summer Saturday night back in high school, Suzanne and I were cruising around the suburbs, looking for something to do, and we stopped into a local convenience store for soda and candy. As luck would have it, a crew of cute guys was in the convenience store, and they invited us to their party, saying, “We looked over and two blondes had just pulled up, so we had to come over and invite you.” We went to the party and were
not
murdered, despite what
Dateline NBC
would have predicted, and we had a wonderful time! Score one for blondes getting positive attention!

But the eye-catching nature of blondeness can also be a negative, “nowhere to run, nowhere to hide” situation that makes you stand out when perhaps you’d rather blend in. Because their yellow hair stands out in a crowd, blondes must be thoughtful about the types of establishments that they frequent. It’s all too easy for an evening of live music to turn into the legendary night when your best friend (and fellow blonde) gets punched in the face.

In late summer 2004, I was living back at home with my parents after my year of living in Chicago. Yes, I was a “boomerang kid” (graduated from college and ended up living back in my parents’ house) before it was big. I got in on the ground floor of that sad phenomenon, my friend! One evening a few weeks after my return from Chicago, I was reclining on my childhood bed, staring up at the ceiling, which I had covered, twelve years prior, with glow-in-the-dark stars. I thought to myself,
So I guess this is rock bottom? Being twenty-four years old, broke, and sleeping back in your childhood twin bed with glow-in-the-dark stars overhead.

The phone rang (yes, a landline—I’m a Luddite), and it was my lifelong best friend, Suzanne, mercifully inviting me out of the suburbs and into the city. Suzanne and I fell right back into our usual routine of hanging out and having fun, and thank God we did. Suzanne helped me resocialize back to Boston life. That night, Suzanne asked if I wanted to drive to her apartment in Brighton because a Guns N’ Roses cover band called Mr. Brownstone was scheduled to play at the live music hall Harpers Ferry that very night. Her then-boyfriend, Paul, had seen them before and reported that they didn’t just play Guns N’ Roses music; these guys dressed up as Guns N’ Roses and put on a hell of a show. Wait—a lineup of five hard-rocking, bewigged dudes belting the sweet melodies originally created by Axl, Slash, Izzy, Duff, and Steven? Before you can say, “I might be a little young, but honey, I ain’t naïve,”
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I was driving into Boston for the night’s festivities.

I parked my parents’ car (because I was going hog with the whole “reverting to high school life” thing) on the street and climbed the stairs to Suzanne’s third-floor walk-up apartment. It was a dingy three-bedroom apartment, but it boasted a big front porch with a beautiful view of L.A. (Lower Allston)—specifically Brighton Avenue, the street on which Harpers Ferry was located. So we were stumbling-distance from the concert venue—clutch. Suzanne; her new beau, Paul; and his handsome buddy Ben (well hello there!) were all drinking beers on the porch when I arrived. I was glad to meet Paul as he and Suz had recently started dating and I wanted to suss out if this guy was good enough for my best friend. By transitive property, it earned Paul some points that his best friend, Ben, was not only hot but his love of all things Guns N’ Roses almost rivaled my own. After Bud Lights on the porch,
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we walked the few blocks to Harpers Ferry, paid the ten-dollar admission fee, bought some cheap beers, and got ready for our minds to be blown thanks to Mr. Brownstone. I was prepared for the universe to explode when the GnR cover band Mr. Brownstone played the song “Mr. Brownstone” as it would be a critical mass of Brownstone-themed rock.
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The band’s blond-wigged drummer (the would-be Steven Adler) caught my eye first as his platinum locks caught the multicolored lights. He wasn’t as heroin-chic emaciated as the real Steven Adler, but that was probably a good thing for the stability of the cover band. Three guitarists then came out and I looked them over, assuming the other blond-wigged guy was Duff, the short brown-wigged guy was Izzy, and of course the curly-wig-and-top-hat combo was the unmistakable Slash. It’s common knowledge that a good Axl can make or break a GnR cover band, and while theirs was a pudgy Axl, he rocked the serpentine dance with such skill that it didn’t matter.

The band Mr. Brownstone rocked hard and put on a hell of a show, just as Paul had predicted. They blazed through songs off of
Appetite for Destruction
,
Lies
, and both
Use Your Illusion
s as the crowd ate up their hard-rocking antics. Pudgy faux Axl’s thick white legs poked out from beneath his kilt as he enthusiastically shrieked that he was loaded like a freight train and yet simultaneously flying like an aeroplane. Who doesn’t love songs about modes of transportation?
Come on!

After a few ditties, Suzanne, Paul, Ben, and I made our way toward the front of the standing-room-only audience. We were all singing along with GnR’s hit song “Paradise City,” which was advancing toward the second half of the song, when the drums switch to double-time and it gets pretty nutso.
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Slash shreds on the guitar, and the song sounds like it’s spiraling out of control as Axl shrieks, “Take me down! Ohhh yeah, spin me round . . .” The power of this chaotic double-time section washed over the crowd, prompting a spontaneous mosh pit to form around the four of us, and we couldn’t fight that wave of madness. We found ourselves at the center of the pit, with assorted limbs flying around us in white-kid rage soup. I just tried to stay with Suzanne, Ben, and Paul as bodies were moving and swirling around us. It was difficult to stay with the group and see where the guys were, though. To that end, Suzanne’s platinum hair was extremely helpful—I kept my eyes out for Suzanne and hoped that Ben and Paul would do the same. She could be our lighthouse so we wouldn’t lose one another in the madness of “Paradise City.”

Just then, a random fist appeared out of nowhere and connected with Suzanne’s cheekbone. “Holy shit, what the shit!?” I shouted, stunned at what had just happened.

“Oh my God!” Suzanne exclaimed putting her hand to her cheek. She’d just been punched square in the face. Suzanne immediately bent down to register the fact that she had been punched in the cheekbone by a random guy. I looked at her boyfriend, Paul, who was horrified, frozen, and unwilling to do anything about this. Thank God Paul’s friend Ben turned out to be less of a pussy as he had seen the stranger punch Suzanne and he was ready to brawl.

“Who the fuck did that? What the fuck!?” nonpussy Ben shouted as he scanned the crowd and tried to find the offending fist. But we were about to see
Random Fist Punch: Part II
as the perpetrator’s balled fist was heading straight for us yet again, this time clutching a makeshift weapon. The drunk jerk thrust a beer bottle in the air and was about to bring it down on our heads. On our
heads
! On our platinum-perfection domes! He was aiming it toward us, like an upside-down parabola of unprompted drunk rage.
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I have no idea why this random stranger was in attack mode and can only guess that he got too caught up in the mosh pit experience. Perhaps he had been rejected by hot blondes back in high school and was eager to unleash some payback on arbitrarily selected members of the blonde community. Perhaps Suzanne’s white-blonde hair just happened to catch his eye and she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the wrong time was about to happen again. The stranger had an upturned longneck bottle of Bud Light in his hand, and it was heading straight for Suz and me. I watched it descend upon us as if in slow motion.

“What the shiiiiiiiit?” I slow-mo choked out just as Ben saved the day and intercepted the bottle’s trajectory with his hand. The bottle then broke all over Ben’s hand, which ran counter to everything I knew about Physics and Anatomy and Physiology.
How did that Bud Light bottle just break on Ben’s hand? Is that even possible? The glass that beer bottles are made of is so thick, most likely so that it won’t easily shatter in a bar fight. Yet one just smashed all over Ben’s fleshy paw. Are his fists made of friggin’ cement!? How did a fun night out in Brighton turn into a scene from the cinematic masterpiece
Road House
?
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I thought.

Within seconds, blood was pouring from Ben’s hand and shards of glass were everywhere, including jammed into his hand and wrist. That was when this Guns N’ Roses concert got a little bit more Guns N’ Roses, as Ben balled up his hand into a bloody fist and wailed the bad guy in the face. I’m almost ashamed to admit that watching a bloody fist connect with a dude’s face to the double-time second half of “Paradise City” is the closest that I have ever come to spontaneous orgasm.