A big piece of my childhood has just passed away. Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson have left this World… early. (She from a long battle against cancer and he from undetermined causes that lead to cardiac arrest.) It is a strange feeling that I am experiencing with this news. I did not know either person personally. I have simply enjoyed their personas from the audience like so many others. But their impact on my life is unmistakeable. I speak today of Farrah Fawcett.
When Farrah became the number one female television star I was early in my elementary school experience; the only ethnic child in an all white Catholic school. I was a young, multi-racial girl with full head of mixed chic hair, and a loving white mother who really had no frame of reference for how to deal with it. Just like every other girl, I wanted so badly to look like Farrah; to have the trademark Farrah Fawcett hair cut, feathered and bouncing in the wind.
My classmates were able to go and get that cut without hesitation. They all came to school with uniformly feathered hair, tossing it this way and that. I was painfully jealous of them. (today whenever I think about it Whoppi Goldberg’s comedy routine about her long luxurious blonde hair always comes to mind.) I was so frustrated with my frizzy curls and their refusal to bend as everyone else’s. I wanted the Farrah Fawcett look, the all mighty feather! I wanted that look so badly in Elementary school that one Valentines Day I took matters into my own hands. I created a “feather” with my blown out, borderline frizzy, mixed hair by folding it up chunk by chunk, and bobby-pinning it into place. This look was forever immortalized by a frightening school picture, (and no, I’m not scanning it in here). As I got older I adjusted the look to a more reasonable facsimile. It didn’t toss in the wind quite the same way as the Charlie’s Angels’ hair did when they did their trademark spin and pose, but it made a statement just the same. And hey, you could see me from far away, hair and shoulders above the crowd! Farrah had her swimsuit poster and I have my school pictures. Iconic as we both were in our own time and space.
SMILE On!
ML
You can find Miss Lori “Musing from her Minivan” at her new blogsite MissLori.TV, as well as on ChicagoMomsBlog, facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Myspace and her own performance website, Miss Lori’s CAMPUS.
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Please refer to Chicago Moms Blog to read Miss Lori’s thoughts about Michael Jackson.
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