Kathy Brown 2

Stubborn As My Hair

I was at the park, two blocks away from home. The moon was at just the right place in the sky, directly in the top of the endless stretch of navy. It made the puddles on the sidewalk flicker. It would be a perfect night for firefly chasing or searching that cloudless sky for shooting stars.

And yet all of the qualities of that lazy night came crashing to a stop when I heard someone shout “Red’s It!”

Ghost in the graveyard. Run! Run! Run!

Once more I was singled out to be It in another game. It never matters what game it is, I am always It. But ghost in the graveyard is different. It is a twisted hybrid of tag and hide-and-seek played out only under the cover of darkness. The person who is It hides while the rest of the group counts. This person is the ghost in the “graveyard” street. Once the others count up to Twelve O’Clock (midnight!) they search the block until they find the ghost. When they finally spot the ghost they scream out to the darkened street, “Ghost in the graveyard. Run! Run! Run!” The Ghost then chases down the group until she catches one of them. The unlucky person who gets caught then becomes It for the next round. Everyone else is only safe if they beat the Ghost back to the base where they counted from.
Not only am I It again, but I am It because I am the first one the neighborhood kids can think of. I am a ghost: A pale-faced, redheaded ghost.
When I played Ghost in the Graveyard as a kid, I never wanted to be It because you lose yourself when you are nothing more than a thing, an It. You are the thing everyone else runs away from, the Other. My hair was something that pulled me out of the background to make me that Other before the game even started.
My red hair has a way of defining me when I least desire it to.

I stand out in the crowd whether I want to or not. In any given situation I am the instant outsider. It doesn’t matter if someone doesn’t notice my hair at first sight. At some point in my relationship with them, I inevitably become “that redheaded girl” as if there is nothing more to me. They know all they need to because of the color of my hair.

On my second day of seventh grade my science teacher decided to call me Red. She thought she was giving me an endearing nickname. But in my head, she was just using my hair as an excuse to not bother learning my name. I was Red in her class all year long. I had made an attempt to go out of my way to show that I didn’t have the time to learn her name as well. I have already come to terms with my stubborn, slightly vengeful side so I don’t need to be reminded of it. It is out there for everyone to see.

I believe the teacher’s name was Mrs. Ferguson. I caught her giggling with the geometry teacher across the hallway once and started calling her Mrs. Flirtison. I wasn’t one of her favorite students that year.

It was at this point in my life that I spent my nights playing Ghost in the Graveyard with my neighbors. I was old enough to hang out with my friends alone at night and young enough to think it was cool to brag about it. I would show off to some of my friends at school that my curfew was later than theirs. What I didn’t tell them was how much I hated Ghost in the Graveyard, and how I would have preferred to be stuck inside like the rest of them instead of outside being taunted by the neighbor kids. When I am It, my pale skin reflects so much in the moonlight that the group can see where I’m hiding before they even step off the base. I lose every time. I am It for the entirety of the night.

I am It for life.

It is easy to ignore these problems, to turn the other way and ignore all troubles that redheads face if you are not one of them. But this would be the easy way out. Redheads, few as we are, still live with brunettes, blonds and all other shades of hair whether natural or otherwise. We are your neighbors, your friends, classmates and siblings, and if that is not enough we are also a dying breed. You wouldn’t go out of your way to poke fun at an endangered species, and redheads are most certainly that.

There was a time when red headedness was far more common. Especially in places like England. The first people living there probably looked a whole lot like me: slender, somewhat tall, pale and redheaded. It was a survival technique. In places like England, it was not uncommon for the fog to stretch over the skies for days on end. Because of this, people needed to become as receptive of the vitamin D that the sunlight gave them as they could. Even when the sun wasn’t shining very brightly. The skin therefore dropped off much of the dark pigment melanin over time which got in the way of this vitamin intake. Without this pigment, skin could easily gain nutrients from the sun even through the haze of England.

The gene that makes a person’s hair red can only happen with this pale skin as well. It is a two way deal. If you ever see a leathery tan redhead walking down the street you can be assured that her hair comes from a bottle rather than her genes.
Fake redheads are a fairly regular occurrence, but what about the natural ones? Red hair was such a common feature of many people, especially in Europe, but we have since severely dropped off in numbers.

There are estimates right now putting redheads at only 4 percent of the American population and only 2 percent left in the world. This is not including those people who chose to “become” a redhead only by dying their hair. The real redheads are those that not only have the coppery strands of hair, but the skin problems that come along with them. We are more susceptible to the skin cancer melanoma because we lack that special pigment melanin that protects skin from the sun. Instead, our pale skin can only freckle in defense from the harsh rays of light, but more often than not we are left with a crispy, painful burn.

It is a cruel fate that only a small few are vulnerable to, but living with people who do not understand this only adds to the pain. On top of the expenses we have to pay for our spf 100 sun screen, we tend to be at the butt end of objectifications directed at us for things we cannot control.

In much of the medieval world it was commonly accepted that red was a sign of the devil and that one’s fiery locks were an outward sign of an inner evil. It’s no wonder that when people think of witches they often have ginger hair under their pointy black hats.

In Sicily today it is still fairly common for people to cross themselves if they come across the path of a redhead.
In ancient Egypt, redheads were burnt at the stake because the red hair was considered a sign of the devil.

It’s really no wonder why there are so few of us around anymore.

I am the first to admit that I am stubborn. My hair, as a part of me, follows my lead. I once tried to dye a streak of purple in it so I could feel a sense of control over it instead of the other way around. The dye turned the chunk of my hair grey instead. In an attempt to make it normal again I tried once more, this time to match my own copper color. It turned pink. Luckily for me it was only a semi-permanent coloring and I was back to normal again after two months. But normal for me is never quite as normal it is for everybody else.

Anyone who has ever accepted a redhead’s temper tantrum as part of their fiery personality that is so well known is just adding to the things that can make it hard to be a redhead. There is a theory that when someone is exposed to the color red, it heightens his or her aggression. So it would make sense that the person who is around the hair the longest would get the largest dose of this color related anger and have it show in his personality.

This argument falls apart as soon as it is started. Even if staring at the color red does make people angry the longer they stare at it, redheads do not often spend their days with their eyes locked on the back of their heads. A redhead’s hair is mostly behind where their eyes can actually see. If anything, those around the redheads are the ones exposed to the hair color the most. More than any of this, red hair is not red! It is more of an orangey color darkened by brown or highlighted with blond. Red is for stop signs and a bull fighter’s cape. It is not a natural color for a head to sprout, and if you see a head that is, call a doctor.
There is no gene that comes along with red hair that gives the redhead a shorter temper. I believe that instead, it seems that redheads become angry quickly because they have to deal with people their whole lives that think they know something about them because of the color of their hair.

My hair color has nothing to do with the fact that I snap at my mother too often. My temper is individual to me and has everything to do with the fact that I was teased so much as a child that I became defensive and bitter. Or maybe because I just enjoy comebacks a little too much.

My problem is that I have a short temper and I am ashamed to admit that I have at times blamed it on my hair color. It seemed like a way to get out of blame for snapping at my mother if I could just say that my genes made me do it. I would not be held responsible. It is like the blond who hears that she is just another dumb blond so many times that she accepts it because it is the easiest way out.
The difference is that there are a lot more blonds than there are redheads. There are fewer people to go against those claiming that redheads are quicker to anger or somehow in a pact with the devil to prove them wrong. This is why it becomes important for outsiders, those not cursed with rusty locks, to pay attention to how unique each red head is. It might even be possible to give them a nickname other than Red or Carrot Top, because those names mean nothing. They say nothing about the person. And giving someone a nickname that means nothing is like telling the person that they are nothing as well.

I nearly maimed my mother after I saw the movie Annie. You may not be able to see it now, but when I was younger, my hair was strawberry blond and extremely curly. I have pictures to prove that I had a baby fro. I was the spitting image of Little Orphan Annie. This is not why I wanted to kill my mother. She couldn’t help passing me that sad little recessive gene that paired with the only one my red haired dad could give. It isn’t her fault I looked like Annie.

But she didn’t have to give me the middle name Anne to go along with the hair.
My third grade class had a field day when a substitute teacher called role with everyone’s middle names and everyone discovered what the “A” in Katherine “A” Brown stood for. We had watched the musical the week before in music class.

Every time it rained one particularly evil child in my class named Brandon would ask me if the sun would be coming out tomorrow. Every time I wanted to punch him square in the nose.

I do have a temper after all.

My life changed over the summer after that year, though. My hair darkened, possibly to match my darker personality. Red hair has so many possibilities to change and the most variations of any other hair color I know. My hair lost its strawberry blond color in favor of one more like a year old copper penny. Best of all, it was suddenly straight. No more Orphan Annie cracks came out of any of my classmates mouths in fourth grade.

I just wish someone would have told me not to wear my hair in braided pigtails. It would have saved me a lot of embarrassment and my other nickname: Pippi Longstocking.

It’s only the adults who go out of their way to call me Chatty Kathy in honor of my uncanny resemblance to the original pull-string Chatty Cathy doll from the 1960s. Most of my teachers and parents’ friends over fifty tend to be the ones who bring this one up the most often. I spent most of my childhood trying desperately to keep quiet so they wouldn’t have reason to call me chatty, but I couldn’t help my desire to chatter. It was inevitable, I guess.

When I finally grew out of the name calling years of my elementary school, I finally made my way into high school. When I was there I made a friend named Rita, the first other red haired girl that was my age. We saw each other from across the crowded gym one day and I like to think we saw something in each other that made us walk towards each other, but it was most likely because we recognized each other from Girl Scout camp. We had gone to the same summer camp but had never been formally introduced.

I never thought much about it, but I was doing the same thing that my peers did to me that I hated so much: I yanked Rita out of the crowd and gravitated towards her because of her hair. I saw that we had something in common and grabbed hold of it the moment I needed to have a friend. I used her for her hair just like anyone who had ever called me Red before had done. It is my advantage that she did not take offence or realize that this was the reason I originally approached her.

Despite the reason, we became friends soon after this, sharing with each other the hardships of being a redhead by hiding from the glares of the sun and our gym teacher in the shade during gym class.

One day we went shopping, as we had many other days before, but this time was different. We were in the food court and in line for pizza. I had reached the end of the line and it was time for me to pay. The lady at the register told me to wait so she could add up my sister’s order with mine. Rita and I gave each other a look. We didn’t even look like we could be related, so why was this woman assuming we were sisters? The only thing we had in common was our red hair and even that was different. Hers was the traditional blond red and mine was the shade of an old penny. She had freckles, I didn’t. She was tall and wide, I was on the short side and thin.

It made me wonder why people always thought that any redhead traveling with another must be related. I was certain that no one would make that same assumption about two brunettes wandering the mall together.
The only good thing about this assumption was that I was always able to sneak into school events with her. The tickets for our school’s events like plays and football games were good for a student’s entire family. Then and only then was it okay that people assumed we were sisters. Rita happily became a Brown and we split the cost of school sponsored events with me. But there have been more recent events that make me think I will never stop being made It for my red hair.

A month ago I fell off a ledge outside of my dorm. The reason behind why I was on the ledge in the first place is beside the point, as all actions that lead to life changing events are, but I ended up falling twelve feet to a sidewalk of solid concrete landing only on my right knee and the palms of my hands. I looked at the blood on my hands and thought about how they would sting in the morning.
It wasn’t until I tried to move that I noticed that my right kneecap had shattered.
As I waited for the ambulance to take me to the hospital I clutched my knee not knowing the problem but knowing that something was wrong. It didn’t hurt at all. My friends that stood around me told me I must be in shock because I wasn’t in pain. My leg just did not look natural. Through my new dark jeans my knee was pointy where it shouldn’t have been.

After what felt like three hours but was most likely about five minutes I was transferred to an ambulance and finally ended up in the emergency room. The doctor who helped me once I got there was so cheery that I wanted to kick her, with my good leg anyway. She bounced around the emergency room sticking me full of needles full of morphine, the only thing she did that day that I approved of. Eventually she whipped out a pair of what at the time I assumed were garden sheers and started cutting away at my fancy new jeans. I cried out as she got to my knee when it sent out a jolt of pain. It was when she was ripping away all of my clothes and I was sitting on the emergency table naked and in gut wrenching pain when she casually asked me “I’m sorry dear, but I have to ask: Is that your natural hair color?”
I couldn’t speak. I was amazed by her ability to make small talk while I was in such a vulnerable position. I had never in my entire life felt as small as I did on that cold plastic table, and the doctor wanted to chat with me about my hair.
It is because she felt that she knew something about me because of my hair color. She was able to ignore everything else that was going on to comment on something as superficial as the color of my hair. It gives people like my ER doctor an excuse to look past the pain I am in so she can pretend she knows something to say to me that I will appreciate.

Then again it did help me keep my mind off the kneecap I had shattered long enough for her to drape me in a flimsy hospital gown. I’m not sure if she was really trying to distract me from the pain I was in or if she really was hoping my answer would have been “No, I use Copper Curls no. 48” so she could share in my red headedness.
I rarely think about the times when I actually want people to notice my red hair, but those times do exist. There are times when I vaguely find myself wanting to stand out a little bit more from the crowd. These are mostly times when I see a guy I think is cute and hope against hope that he likes redheads. It is a coin toss, though. I know an equal number of people who are attracted to redheads as I do people who find it somehow offensive.

One particularly bad memory of mine was when the boy I asked to the turnabout dance in ninth grade turned me down. It wasn’t until after I had my friend Jenny do some detective work that I found out it was because I reminded him a little bit too much of Ronald McDonald.

I had to think about what specifically made him think “Big Scary Clown” when he thought of me until I finally got it. Between my red hair, pale skin and not so dainty feet I did actually add up into a fairly neat little package all that was associated with the famous clown fast food icon.

Great. Just what I needed: To make my potential dates think of Big Macs and
McNuggets as we slow dance. And I was a vegetarian.

It was enough to make me want to pull a bag over my head and never come out until someone needed me to enter a Bozo the Clown look-alike contest to save their life.
Clowns especially play significant role to redheads. In Hollywood especially red hair is a signifier of a comedian. In the earlier days of television one actress forms the start for this trope. Her name was Lucille Ball and it wasn’t long before all of the world unanimously agreed that they loved Lucy.
What many people fail to know, however, is that Lucille Ball started out her career in B movies with bleached blond hair. She was not actually loved by the executives in charge of casting. With her blond hair, Lucy was cast as the object of desire against a tall dark and handsome male leading role. It didn’t take her long to realize that there were enough blonds in the acting world for her to be unable to make a name for herself. There was not enough about her that was original.
So she decided to dye her hair back to her now famous red color. Right away she was able to get a job as the wise cracking redhead she became, even in the black and white world she acted in. Viewers were highly aware that she had red hair, even before the show was broadcast in color. It was her hair that allowed here to play the funny girl on TV instead of being ignored as just another blond idol to lust after.

Lucille Ball went from a blond sex symbol to a wisecracking redhead. Both roles that she played were extremely stereotypical. She played both the platinum blond sex object to the funny girl with crazy red hair. In the world of celebrities, this is quite common. The blonds are the beautiful out of reach lust-worthy beings while the redheads are the clowns. It is almost like a person, especially women, needs to dye her hair in order to play a certain role.

Comedian Kathy Griffin knows this Hollywood rule firsthand. She was interviewed by a reporter Chris McNamara from the Chicago Tribune about what it is like to be a redhead in Hollywood. He asked her if she found it to be an advantage or something that was holding her back. She answered him by saying “It’s an asset if you’re a comedy girl. People associate redheads with comedy. Lucy and Bozo. It didn’t hurt them.”

It is true. People see the hair, find it amusing or out of the ordinary and assume the person underneath is as well. They think of it as a funny hat, say a jester’s cap with tingling bells dangling off. But red hair is not like a hat. You cannot take it off the minute you want to be taken seriously. In my own experiences, I could not even try to hide the color with dye. It just bleeds right through leaving me with a clown wig stuck to the top of my head.

The red headed wig is interesting to me because for the past 10 years I have been donating my hair to Locks of Love. This company takes hair donations of ten inches or more to make into wigs for people, usually children, who are going through chemotherapy and lose their hair. Every two years I chop off a long braid and send it in to them to make into a wig. So why, if I have had so much trouble being a redhead would I want to give someone a wig of the hair that made my childhood miserable? I guess it is for the same reason I would like to have children some day and hope that one of them will have red hair. I believe that many of the misunderstandings about redheads are there partially because there are so few of us around anymore. If it is possible to keep us growing strong, maybe we won’t die out at the rate we are going now, and possibly keep enough of us around to defend ourselves.

It is the same with the hair donations. I know that as much as I can hate my red hair, of someone told me that I would have to give it up during chemotherapy, I would not want to settle for someone else’s hair color. The minute you are told you can’t have something anymore, never mind that you didn’t want it at first, you will want I more than ever just because you can’t. If a child is sitting in a room not playing with a ball and his little sister comes in and starts to play with it, he will instantly feel the need to have the ball for himself, even though he had no desire for it moments earlier.

If I can make red-haired wigs available in the world I will. Over the years I have donated at least four times for four different wigs. I just hope that these wigs will be used for good and not the way so many redheads with their own hair are using it. I am not making clown wigs when I donate, but some natural hair is unfortunately being used this way.

People like Carrot Top who use their hair to be amusing play on this clown wig theory in their comedy. They ruin it for the rest of the redheaded community because viewers see his hair and immediately think there is some sort of joke involved. He is especially famous for his ATT&T commercials that were bombarding television for too many years in the late nineties. I would be flipping channels and his face would pop up in a hyper excited psychotic frenzy with a massive red afro leading the way. He would scream some odd phrase about calling collect that would be vaguely amusing if it wasn’t thrown at us with the velocity it was. Someone would trip and fall, (perhaps get run over by a truck) and Carrot Top would laugh and perhaps push him back into the street to let it happen again. He would then spout something about how paying for collect calls shouldn’t be that painful.

I found myself wondering why this was so funny and realized over and over again that it wasn’t. So why did they stay around on our TVs for so long? They are ridiculous and stupid. They appeal to the lowest common denominator. They become a familiar sight that we just come to accept.

In this acceptance of ridiculousness we also accept the other parts of the commercials that come along with it. We see Carrot Top’s hair and tie it down with his slapstick humor. It is how Carrot Top sends out the message with his wild a gigantic red afro that redheads are not serious. He is not only out there with his red hair sending this idea, but he goes by the name Carrot Top. He associates every redhead around him with who he is, whether they want to be there with him or not. He is a clown, he is playing a part, and he is letting his hair get laughs for him.
Playing a part of something is an important idea for redheads. There is more than just the idea that redheads are clowns out there. There are far worse things to be called than funny, and as much as I hate to not be taken seriously, I would rather be called a clown than a slut. It might sound odd at first, and many people might even think that this might have more with being a blond than a redhead, but then where did the concept for the drink called “A Red-Headed Slut” come from? It is a combination of Jaegermeister, cranberry juice and Peach Shnapps. The name comes from the fact that the drink is red, but more so because of the joke that after drinking enough of them any girl will become the red-headed slut that lives inside her, regardless of her actual hair color.

Not just a slut, but a red-headed slut. This concept claims that redhead women are less inhibited than most, which means they are sluts. No matter who the person is below the red hair, she is automatically a slut just because she has flashy hair. She is just asking for attention. It is just another way to remind redheads that they are wearing a hat that they can’t take off. This time it is not that they are funny and have to act for the crowd, but now they have to defend their morals. When it comes down to it, given the choice, it is harder to try to defend yourself and act out against what people believe than it is to just give in and play the role the world expects you to be.

Playing a part for people often plays a very strong role in my life. I like to think that it will someday be possible for me to separate myself entirely from Carrot Top and Bozo the clown, but I also know that there are times when it is easier to let people believe they know me because of my hair. I find that being redheaded can be to my advantage. When I am tired or confused I sometimes say things that my friends find mildly amusing. I don’t mean them to be, but when I hear my friends laugh I can’t help but join in with them and pretend like I was actually trying to be funny. I believe it is easier for me to pretend to be funny when I want to be because of my hair.

It is just like my temper. I know it has nothing to do with my hair. Though sometimes I do find it to be a relief to be able to blame my snotty comments on something else when I don’t what to take credit for the jerk I am being. This happens more often than I care to own up to at times.

There might be a day when I will look forward to blaming my hair for me being a slut. I will do something terrible and everyone will look to me for some sort of explanation. I will just shake it off casually, flip my hair over my shoulder as I stalk out the door and say “Whatever, I can’t help myself. Blame my hair. It’s out of my control. Isn’t that just how life is sometimes?”

Okay, maybe not quite that much. But there is an ounce of truth in wanting to use any and all means to blame flaws in character on something other than your own sucky personality. There is something delicious about doing a bad thing because it is out of your hands, or even just pretending that it is. Playing up something that you wish you were or just getting away from the same person you are every day is tempting. It is fun to put on a mask and trick people into believing you are someone other than the boring nobody you really know you are.

It is all about power. When you are in control of the image you can hold something above everybody else. When I am around a group of strangers, I can be whoever I feel like being. One day I can be like Kathy Griffin and mock all those surrounding me and make people laugh as I do so. My mother’s maiden name was Griffin. If she had divorced my dad for some reason and dropped the Brown name or had never gotten married to him, I would have even been able to literally call myself Kathy Griffin. It would be so easy to make strangers believe I was a funny girl, even if I didn’t have one joke to tell them.

That ease and ability to slip into another persona is alluring. It is tempting because any and all power is. Having something someone else does not is intoxicating and invigorating. It is the reason I bragged to my friends about being able to stay out later than them even though I didn’t want to play Ghost in the Graveyard anymore. It was because I had something that they didn’t: I had the power, even if during the game I didn’t. My friends were not there. They did not have to know.
Being It always seemed like a bad thing. I was the other that the neighborhood kids would point out from the crowd. I was the other, but I never paused to think about how this could be good for me. Most of my friends are brunettes and feel as though they are stuck in the crowd. Why should I complain when I stand out of that crowd? Being able to blend only seems important to me because I have never been able to do it. I have always been It without seeing the benefits that It can offer me.
There is something special about not trying at all and still standing out from the people that surround you. I don’t have to worry about always having that designer purse or spiked snakeskin high heels. I always have an accessory clinging to my scalp that I can’t accidentally forget in my room or lose at a party. Not easily anyway. Even when I go to the hospital and I am curled over in agony with a broken knee I have something for a nurse to bring up in a conversation to distract me from the pain. I am an individual without really trying.

Even caught off guard I am able to draw attention to myself. I know that the moment I see a guy that I am very much interested in I find myself praying that he likes redheads. I am never more aware of my hair than when I want people to notice it. If the guy is standing in front of me I make sure to pull it to the front of my shoulders so more of it is showing. I straighten it with my fingertips to make sure not one strand is out of place. The straighter it is and the more uniform, the more it will catch the light from the sun and reflect it to him. If he is behind me, I brush it behind my ear and pull it to my back to get the same result.

I’ve never given it much thought, but I am not attracted to redheaded men. I hope that guys I find attractive like my red hair, but I have never paid much attention to my redheaded counterparts. This might be why redheads are dying out. Since not all redheads are all stuck living in the same Irish towns anymore we have options. We choose to marry and have children with people whose genes will dominate and eventually smother and snuff out the few red hair genes that are left in the world.
I can only hope that if I ever have kids there will be some long lost red haired gene in the mix with their father. With any luck I will have a redheaded kid that I can pass on my years of wisdom to. I will not name her Pippi, Annie or pass my own name down on to her. She will have to go through enough without all that. If I have a boy, I will have to make sure that I don’t name him Bozo or Carrot Top. This to me will be the real challenge.

If my hypothetical future kids ever end up playing Ghost in the Graveyard on sweetly warm summer nights, I will have to let them learn how to be It on their own. You can only learn through experience that being It has it’s own power if you take it back from the others on the sidelines.