My heritage is half Lebanese and half Cajun. Although I’m
not sure what side passed on the abundant hair gene, I do know that for all of
my life, I’ve dealt with hairy arms, hairy legs and a hairy face.
When
I was a teenager, my older cousin, Sylvia, took me under her wing.
She showed me a green and white box, “Jolen Crème Bleach,”
and told me the paste inside would hide my moustache. The directions said the crème
would turn dark hair into soft light hair.
Since
I had more hair on my upper lip than my Uncle Eli, I took her advice and used
the bleach.
To my inexperienced eyes, the hair disappeared. What I’m
sure it looked like was this clueless dark-skinned
girl with dark hair walking around with a blonde moustache, fooling no one.
When I was in my 20’s, I was having a free facial. The
lady told me two things – I should have two eyebrows, not one, and electrolysis
was the solution for the hair on my lip.
Talk about a double burn. It’s not enough that I walked
around with a hairy lip, now I had to contend with my uni-brow.
My
Lebanese/Cajun eyebrow went from one side of my face to the other side. That
woman told me to buy a good pair of tweezers and start plucking.
I
took her advice to heart and got after that uni-brow. So much, in fact, that my
eyebrows would have to cross the width of the Mississippi River to touch again.
But tweezing and electrolysis hurts. So when my pain
threshold and checkbook both started screaming in pain, I told myself to live
with the hair.
I
became adept at talking with my finger over my upper lip and I learned how to
position my hand in just the right way under my nose so people thought I was
deep in thought, not trying to hide something.
Then a friend suggested waxing. It was much cheaper than
electrolysis, she said, and not as expensive. All I had to lose was some hair,
so I went with my sister and sisters-in-law to a salon.
Here’s
the conversation from that visit:
“I’d like to get my upper lip waxed, please.”
The lady looks closer.
“Oh, you need your brows done too,” she says.
So when I get in the room, she takes out a magnifying glass
and says I need my chin, the sides of my face, my eyebrows and along the
hairline all waxed.
In other words, the whole face.
To the non-informed, waxing consists of going into a softly
lit room with gentle music playing. Then a quiet woman with tiny hands comes
into the room and assures you everything will be okay.
She takes a wooden stick and dips it in a pot. She tells
you the mixture will be warm on your face, which it is, and you begin to relax.
Then this nice woman puts a piece of cotton gauze over the warm wax and gently
rubs it over the wax.
The tender
woman instantly mutates into Magilla Gorilla who, with one mighty tug, rips the
wax and gauze off your face along with every hair follicle in its way.
You want to dunk your head in a bucket of ice water to
stop the stinging. But then Magilla’s applying that nice warm wax to another
hairy spot and you realize the truth – your hair, your problem.
So at the family reunions this summer, I know how to
figure out who’s related to me.
The girls who look like my Uncle Eli.
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