GOD, I wish I’d had this T-shirt 30 years ago. And most of the others, too. If I had a nickel for every time I was singled out and ridiculed for the color of my hair, I’d be richer than Bill.
And for the record, I qualify for the “100% Genuine Authentic, Rare Hare, Since Birth, No Harmful Dyes, No Chemical Additives” T-shirt, so long as the chemical additives don’t include permanent wave solution and certain recreational molecules.
It started from the moment of my birth. I wasn’t even all the way “here” when my mother groggily asked “What color is its hair?” before wanting to know what gender. She was also a redhead, and so was my dad. It’s a redhead thing.
The nurse swabbed the birthgoop off my head and teased a full inch and a half of flaming red hair out on to a contrasting swatch of cotton wool. Then she and the doc burst into laughter, and that was how I came into the world.
The laughter then was congratulatory, but during my childhood and teen years, I learned to grit my teeth and ignore the laughter and taunts from people with colorless hair. Compliments never came, except from little old ladies whose taste and discernment was therefore suspect, since they were born in a previous century. So I grew up thinking I was hopelessly ugly, because that was all I ever heard from kids my age. And that was mostly the fault of my hair.
I was a weird kid, and no mistake. Not only was I bigger than most of the other kids, but I read on a level 2 or 3 grades beyond them, I was not Mormon in a mostly LDS public grade school in Salt Lake, I had funny clothes, funny teeth, a funny name, a squint (and later, Oh Lord, glasses), and a totally goofy sense of humor.
What’s funny about “Ginny?” Well, now it’s sort of cool, since the advent of Ginny Weasley (and she’s a redhead too, bless her!). But in a sexually repressed place and time like 60s-70s Utah, a name like “Virginia” is just too tempting for anyone with a true-blue moronic sense of humor.
And soon, I had my very own bully, beginning from the first grade right through the middle of junior high. It started with making fun of my name – I have no idea how she even found it out, because she was a grade ahead. But she thought it was funny, and soon soured it into “Vinegar.”
“Vinegar! Vinegar!” she would shrill, coaching other kids to join her. For some reason I found the comparison to an ingredient in salad dressing infuriating and humiliating.
Her own name was something like Louise, but made everyone call her “Didi.” For God’s sake, that’s a baby-talk nickname, but it struck fear and terror in my heart all the same.
She also had a funny crick in her neck and a predatory, hawklike grimace instead of a smile. She was thin, had “good” clothes by the intensely hierarchical standards of the playground, and infuriatingly enough ended up modeling in local department store ads in high school.
Buzzard-necked skeletal bitch. 😉
Fortunately, she and her cohort were a year older, so I had a year “off” from her in 6th grade when she went on to the next level, and another year “off” when she went to high school. That was also the year I got the braces off (oh, yeah that too in junior high) and started wearing makeup.
Her strategy was typical of girl bullies – they would encircle me someplace out of sight of teachers and push me back and forth, pulling on my hair and slamming me into the rough stone wall of the grade school building. In junior high it changed to just the name calling, but slacked off when I found out the name of her lieutenant, who tried bullying me on her own one day, with some of the rest of the girls.
She said it was Bertha. She was a lot smaller than me. I had totally had enough and instead of slouching and trying to be invisible, I straightened up and looked her in the eye and said in a gutteral voice “Bertha Butt? One of the Butt sisters?? Bertha Butt? Bertha Butt?” and that was pretty much it. A few other kids looked over, laughed, and she just melted away in an embarassed silence.
There were a few attempts to start whisper campaigns, and Didi got “the cutest guy in school” to come in one of my classrooms to call me Vinegar one last time, but it was really over when a rather nice but dim older girl looked at me blankly one day as we passed and said “Aren’t you the girl they call ‘Ketchup’ or something?” I laughed and said “no, but being called a red condiment would actually make more sense.”
And about that cutest guy in school thing – what a rip. There just weren’t that many cute guys in the olden days in Salt Lake. This one was considered “cute” because he looked like Donny Osmond. Ewww.
However, new bullies came along for a while in junior high – this time a pack of nameless boys. I didn’t develop as fast as the other girls and of course there were the glasses and braces. And the hair always acted like a homing beacon for loudmouth jackasses. For a few months I had to endure being kicked from behind and barked at as I walked home, and there was always more hair-grabbing and dancing back out of my reach. I tried kicking them back and think I might have actually connected once. Heh.
But it kept happening. I tried different routes, but there was only one really direct way home, and they were always there.
Then one day I turned around and barked right back at them – hey, if they were going to call me a dog, I could oblige. And then I found a few people to walk with along the “dangerous” 2 blocks of my route home, and that bit was over.
There was still the dirty old man at the end of the block to avoid who was supposed to be a child molester (and I believe it, based on the things he said to me to try to get me in his house), but he left us all alone after my mom called his wife and complained.
Then I went to high school – thank God, none of the previous bullies went there. And suddenly, I was more anonymous and left-alone than I’d ever been. It was a relief, but it was also a social vacuum.
I lived in a Ginny-shaped hole in the universe for 3 years, because no one would approach me or talk to me unless I approached them, and I found it hard to do this because my experience had taught me to be cautious and wary, and “dampen my fires” so to speak.
Gradually, I found a few more friends and had people to eat with and talk with between classes, but I was always on the edge of cliques and never truly felt a part of anything or close to anyone. About then I had become active in a Protestant church youth group and a Masonic girls group (the Masons in Utah excluded Mormons at that time) so I had a social life outside of school. I got contacts, started wearing flattering clothes, wore carefully applied makeup (believe me, it’s tough to find good makeup if you’re a redead – there was nothing like Just for Redheads then).
And I’d look at myself in the mirror and despair, because although I didn’t think I was ugly anymore, I had no idea if I was anything other than “plain.” I had the usual number of eyes and noses, but that was as far as I could judge my own appearance. There were many screaming arguments with my mother, starting with my complaining about my looks and my mother saying “But you’re such a pretty girl.”
Grrrrrrr! Release the nukes! No, I wasn’t! Nobody my age ever said that, so anything my mother said (or those damn simpering little old ladies) could NOT possibly be true.
My hair wouldn’t hold a curl for long, and having it long and rampant (which would have been cool) was not an option, so it was mostly short in high school, except for the horrible home perm Mom gave me. That’s when I got called “Poodle” by a couple of friends, but fortunately sucky mean people didn’t hear about it, and incessant shampooing relaxed the curls and I cut it shorter soon. But while I had it, I looked like Lucille Ball standing behind Danny Kaye.
About then, one of the younger guys started calling me “Carrot Bottom.” So original. Yes, I’m pear shaped – so’s yer head, moron boy. Fortunately, no one else took it up. He’s now an opera singer – may his voice crack on the high note when the reviewer from the Trib is in the audience! May he never leave the obscurity of regional opera, and end his days carrying a spear in the back row!
May he never quit his day job!
So anyway, no dates in high school. No phone calls. I went to casual dances and stood around for hours, trying to look confident and approachable. I was hardly ever asked to dance, and I assumed that if I asked a guy instead, he’d laugh at me or look horrified.
I discovered the “Ginny-shaped hole in the universe” theory when I noticed that if I started out standing in the middle of a group of girls, pretty soon people would move away or get asked to dance, and I’d be left standing in a large open space about 10 or 20 feet across. Bored, with no one to talk to, I’d move on to the edge of the dance floor, looking approachable. Soon, there would be a big gap on either side of me. Concerned, I’d move around and actually approach guys that I knew to be friendly, just to chat, on the “how’s it going” level of conversation. Soon, they would sidle away with an excuse or an apology, wearing fixed and slightly embarassed smiles.
It happened over and over, and it convinced me that I must have been so horribly ugly and so socially unacceptable that I was like a leper with invisble lesions. There were a couple of experiences that tended to contradict this point of view (damn, I should have said “Yes” when Mike Morris asked me to dance, but I panicked because no one had ever done that before).
Eventually, I had a boyfriend in high school who went to my church, but he was just no fun. Didn’t dance, didn’t want to get dressed up and go on any kind of see-and-be seen “date.” We actually got dressed up for a formal dance once ( I think it was Homecoming) with the corsage and the whole bit, and just outside the door he balked, and I went along with it, so we called his dad for a ride and went to a movie. So I missed my one moment of walking in the door of a formal dance and having everybody see me all dressed up. And I’m pretty sure that after he dumped me, he threatened other guys not to go out with me. What a dud.
But now after a lot of reading online I have come to the conclusion that it wasn’t my fault that I didn’t date, and that I wasn’t ugly or unattractive. And it wasn’t my hair, because that was the one thing that people kept saying they thought was unique (in a good way) in yearbook entries at the end of senior year. Red hair is very uncommon in Utah – you’ve never seen so many natural colorless blonds. Still, it wasn’t the cause of ALL my grief. I think.
I’m not sure, but I think I was shunned for not being a Mormon. Not formally as in “here be ye list of sinners ye shall not consort with” shunned, but “She’s not like me, I might go to hell if I talk to her.” Or, “Dad said for me not to date outside the charch.”
Can you believe it??
And then I assumed that everyone else was LDS, so I didn’t bother trying to make friends with them because I was bored with defending my beliefs against the inevitable attempt to convert. So aside from a few people that were either raised to be tolerant of other beliefs (Julie, you sweet girl you!) or people I knew who were also not Mormon, there just weren’t that many people who were comfortable talking to me or being around me, and it wasn’t because of how I looked or dressed, but because of my religion.
Weird.
I’ve struggled with this lingering anger and bitterness over being excluded all my life, and it’s reached the point where I really need to laugh it off.
Because in spite of it all, I’m happy now, dammit, and my husband loves me and adores my hair.
So there.