Confessions of a Full-Figured Gal

Sometimes, Beauty is a Beast

Sometimes, Beauty is a Beast

 If Mary Schwester ever grows up, she can be said to have done so in the town of W------, where she still resides.  Mary can be seen at least once a week in the ShopRite, snapping her fingers and dancing in the aisles to the music playing over the public address system..

 For women, socializing comes easy.  If you want to start an animated discussion with almost any woman, talk about hair.  It never fails.  Women with straight hair envy the curly-tressed, curly girls desire pin-straight locks, those of us with high-maintenance hair sigh at the sight of women who look gorgeous with all their hair chopped off, while women with utilitarian short 'dos grit their teeth because they “have to” wear their unmanageable hair that way.

 I was a teenager through the early 1970s.  Look through my high school yearbook if you want to see 500 Marcia Brady wanna-bes.  Oh, how many of us wasted our youth and beauty wearing the trendy but highly unflattering straight, parted in the middle, hair.  (Editorial note:  Mary Schwester was not particularly beautiful in her youth.)  I was ever so proud of the length of my hair, which was long enough that it sometimes got caught in the desk chairs at school, down where the seat attached to the back.  My friends pointed out that there were clumps of hair hanging off the chairs in all my classrooms.  In addition to my hair being perfectly straight, flat, and fashionably stringy, my natural color was described by my so-called friends as '[expletive deleted] brown'.

 I rarely wish myself younger, and I am often thankful that I'm not a young girl today, but sometimes I wish that my teenaged self could have had the opportunity to have highlights, or have my hair half black and half red, as some young girls do today.  The most we could do was get bizarre shades if we were brave enough to use “Sun-In” or, God help us, lemon juice. The summertime-accidentally-green hair caused by lemon juice and pool water was something not even the most avant garde high school student could pull off in 1970.

 Another hair fact from the 60s and 70s that no one recalls with affectionate nostalgia, is that few of us washed our hair every day, no matter how badly it needed it.  We believed it was bad for the hair.  So, I would try to plan my activities around my alternating 'clean hair days'.  

 The old saw, “I can't, I have to wash my hair,” sounds like a lame excuse, but in pre-blow dryer days, if you had a lot of hair, it was perfectly legitimate.

 When the boys began wearing extraordinarily long hair in the 70s, I was amazed at how many gorgeous heads of hair were wasted on them.  I don't know what the boys I saw in school used on their hair, but in my family, shampoo was for girls.  The males used plain old bar soap.

 We didn't have all the cool hair products that clutter up my bathroom today.  No gel (unless you count Dippity Do), no volumizer, no styling paste (unless you count Brylcreem), no molding mud.  Have you ever used molding mud?  It's like modeling clay. It's so much fun to give my hair stiff little flips and points like the meringue on a pie.  It makes my hair look just like a wig. 

 Speaking of wigs, my mother had a wig so she could look nice at a moment's notice without going to the beauty parlor.  Here's something that I haven't seen in years:  women in the grocery store with a head full of rollers under a scarf.  Great big rollers, sometimes orange juice cans, under a gigantic scarf (maybe it was a tablecloth), or hundreds of little pink rollers.  So maybe you looked like an idiot all day, but that night, such gorgeousness!  Anyway, back in those days, it was nothing but women in the grocery store during the day, and who needed to look good for them?  The rollered lady was presumably going to look good for her man that night.  “My baby takes the morning TRAIN, he works from nine to five and THEN...” (Excuse me, I just had a Sheena Easton moment and I had to get up and line-dance all by myself).

 Moving directly south of hair, we come to makeup.  I'm always fascinated with female rites of passage, and makeup was one of those back in my day.  It may seem strange to girls today, but we had to wait at least until puberty to wear stockings, high heels, and makeup.  Today, of course, we see fifth graders in four-inch heels and eight year olds in mascara and lip gloss. I have an older sister whose teen years were in the 60s, when gobs of mascara and white lips were in vogue, and I remember my father sending my sister's girlfriends into the bathroom to ”wash that stuff off your face!”  I wasn't the only one with strict parents, judging by the number of girls who applied their makeup in homeroom. I remember how grown-up I felt, wearing lipstick for the first time at the age of sixteen.

 Lipstick!  I used to buy lipstick like a drunkard buys alcohol.  Need a little pick-me-up?  Buy a new lipstick.  I've never used up a lipstick.  I actually have the first lipstick I ever bought (Estee Lauder, Island Pink, still wearable) in my great big coffee can full of lipsticks.  Nobody who knows me would ever guess my weakness for lipstick, because I put it on in the morning, and by the time I get to work, it's disappeared.  I'm too self-conscious, and usually too busy, to keep putting it on during the day.  Lip gloss, at least, can be swiped on without even looking in a mirror. When lip gloss first came “in”, it was strange to see women pulling out a little wand that looked for all the world like the applicator in the Mercurochrome bottle and swiping their lips.  (Whatever happened to Mercurochrome, anyway?)  Lip gloss, what a rip-off.  You put it on and it's gone in seconds.  I read a make-up tip:  “Do what the models do, lick the rim of your cup or glass before drinking and your gloss will not come off.”  Do this, and watch people edge away from you in the restaurant.

 Don't you love makeup tips?  Did you ever read that you should “fill in” your lips with lip liner so that your lipstick stays on?  Did you ever realize that your $16 department store lip liner only has a quarter-inch of liner in the seven-inch pencil, or enough for about four applications if you try this trick?  Mind you, it does work, but who can afford it!  I know, I know, there are cheaper lip liner pencils in the drug stores,  but they feel like you're using a regular old #2 lead pencil.

 I put makeup on in the morning and I leave the house feeling like I made a real effort to look my best.  I feel like I've put on my armor and am prepared to face the battle.  I'm able to maintain this confidence and security by not looking in the mirror again until I get home.  Makeup tip:  “Be sure to remove all your makeup before going to bed.”  What makeup?  Somewhere, somehow, during the day, it all evaporated into thin air.  Nothing is left.   Not a flake of three coats of mascara, no eyeliner or shadow even if I left the house looking like Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra.  (Editorial note:  Mary Schwester in no way resembles Elizabeth Taylor, not even Elizabeth Taylor as she looks today.  Do not go looking for a woman resembling Elizabeth Taylor if you want to locate Mary.) Where does it all go?  Maybe my evaporated makeup is up there in the atmosphere, filling the hole in the ozone layer.

 You know, when I was young and charming (Editorial note:  No, she wasn't)  I looked in the mirror and I was never happy with what I saw.  Today I glance in the mirror and continue on my way with a mental image of myself  looking great.  Oh, you may see a chubby middle aged woman with wiggy-looking hair sticking out in lemon-meringue points, but in my heart, I'm a sixteen year old girl dancing through my day in Island Pink lipstick. Aren't we all!

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