Last
Sunday, while attending Quaker Meeting, I sat behind a woman whose hair color
was one I call “optical brown.”
By
that I mean it was a medium-brown color subtly suffused with red-orange.
I call it optical brown because the only place I have seen this exact color hair
previously is on movie actors I’ve observed in various Los Angeles locations
and on airplanes. These are people whose
natural hair color is elusive and, in a very real way at this point,
irrelevant. Work requires them to dye
their hair frequently and I believe that the hue of brown you see on them
(which looks freakish and unnatural up close) probably photographs extremely
well and looks rich and lustrous on-screen.
Unfortunately,
the harsh treatment these actors’ hair receives coarsens it; up close it really
looks ghoulish. In one two-week period
some years ago, I had occasion to observe Winona Ryder, Sigourney Weaver (both engaged
in making the final Alien picture) and Kevin Bacon (my seatmate) up close. All of these physically attractive individuals
sported optical brown coifs that had the texture of the cheap “doll hair” you
might recall from childhood. They
looked, for all the world, like a variant version of Village of the Damned.
I
should mention that the person seated in front of us at Meeting had really
beautiful hair, which reminded me (in its color and gloss) of the coats of some
of the gorgeous horses we passed by on our way there. We spoke briefly with her at the rise of
Meeting and she seemed as pleasant as the very fine weather that day which, unlike yesterday, was
a very good one.
