The Mad Hatter

As an American Jew with Eastern European origins, I am pretty damn pale. I also have very dark hair on my arms and legs (if I don't shave the gams, which usually don't, but did recently so I could wear a skirt to work), not to mention my pits and nether regions, and increasingly, my chinny chin chin. I decided that the dark hair is nature's way of protecting me from the sun. Other people have pigment and melanin, I have lots of dark hair for the rays to penetrate before giving me skin cancer. It's almost ingenious, except that I do not really have enough hair on my face, neck, shoulders, chest, and back to wander about uncovered without endangering my supple and youthful skin. (Uh huh.) So it's either sunscreen, which I hate on my face because I swear I constantly feel it, or a large hat.

After discovering yesterday that wandering around the Upper West Side does looking like Little Bo Peep in a wide brim straw hat with black ribbons that tie under my chin does not deter people from asking me for directions (perhaps if I had taken Missy's suggestion and ate the strawberries in my cooler/"basket" while walking around and sweating profusely, that would make me scarier, not that I mind if people ask me for directions), I wore a different hat this morning. I figured that the good people of the south Bronx are significantly more likely to mock me while I walk down the street to work than the batty old ladies wearing similar hats in my neighborhood. My blue fisherman-style hat (reversible to orange!) is also ridiculous, but it does have the Mets logo on it since I got it free last year at a Mets game. The orange side (which I never wear facing out - I'm a winter, and I learned in the modeling class that I took at the community center when I was in 4th grade that winters should never, ever wear orange!) also has a gas company logo, but on the blue side, I glued a Cubs patch over the Gulf patch so that I could show my dual team love. It's awesome.

Anyway, by the time I arrived at work, I was a sweaty mess, and I was sure that I would have a vile case of hat head that would be hard do fix once the sweat dried into a hair-spray like substance. I immediately ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror to fix things up. To my surprise, my hair actually looked better than it did before I put the hat on and left my apartment. Go figure.