peevish mama

I just finished Tina Fey’s autobiography, Bossypants, and it did nothing to dissuade me from my prior opinion that she’s hilarious. And smart. And cool. And hilarious. It was a perfect quick summer read and follow-up to the phenomenal yet heartwrenching Beloved by Toni Morrison, which we’re reading in book club. (Damn, ladies. What in the HELL? Counting the days till Wednesday night!)

Back to Tina (yes, I feel we’re on a first name basis now). Tina made me laugh over and over, and while I can’t relate to her sexy comedy and television life, I can sure as hell relate to coming up as a “brunette” in the seventies and eighties. She writes: “Let me start off by saying that at the University of Virginia in 1990, I was Mexican. I looked Mexican, that is, next to my fifteen thousand blond and blue-eyed classmates, most of whom owned horses, or at least resembled them. I had grown up the “whitest” girl in a very Greek neighborhood, but in the eyes of my new classmates, I was Frida Kahlo in leggings.”

She proceeds to talk about how she was inevitably drawn to super “Caucasian” guys, as was I. Such is the curse of a dark girl. My first TV crushes were blond (Bo Duke, Ricky Shroder, and Alice’s son, Tommy) and my first two boyfriend were blond Johns. And oh, how I coveted Cindy’s golden ringlets and Farah’s fabulous feathered do. I tried to get my formidable head of hair cut into feathers and it was so thick and heavy (and untouched by a curling iron – who knew you had to style it?) that I looked like Dorothy Hamil’s younger, retarded cousin who had accidentally injested copious amounts of Miracle Grow in an unsupervised gardening episode. Seriously, it was a bowl cut on steroids, voluminous and shiny, like a majestic, fecund mushroom – only it shrouded most of my face, which, in retrospect, is probably for the best.

I too was the frequent victim of mistaken ethnic identity. My middle school bus driver assumed that since I had dark hair and was at the same bus stop as the three Cho brothers, I must be their sister. It’s no wonder, considering my bus driver was an overweight, middle aged, BLOND Michigander by the name of Tanya. Why would Tanya need to distinguish between an Argentine girl and three Chinese boys? Aren’t they all the same? Those . . . brunettes? Only I had no idea I had been lumped into their family until one day I was getting off the bus and she yelled after me in her Midwest corn chip accent: Be sure to tell yer mother about yer brother’s nose bleed now. I stopped and turned around. Her arm jiggled as she pulled the lever. The bus door closed with a hiss.

Not that it’s a big deal. It’s not. So people think I’m Chinese (those three Chinese brother can be very misleading). Or Greek (I was in Greece). Or Arab (I did live in suburban Detroit). Or Indian (I used to get very very tan in Florida). So what? But when you’re young and you just want to fit in, it is kind of a big deal. At least Tina’s name was Tina. Try Gabriela. In Michigan. In the seventies. Oh, how I longed to be named Kim. Or Nancy. Sigh. I LOVED the name Nancy. It sure was prettier than Garbage-ella. Kids can be cruel. Clever, admittedly, but cruel.

Being a brunette or ethnic or whatever you want to call it certainly doesn’t kill you. Or even maim you. I like to think that the sense of being different, of being apart gives you the requisite space you need to observe. You aren’t splashing around having chicken fights in the pond; you’re standing on the shore, watching. And you can actually see better standing on the shore. At least until you’re old enough to beat it on out of there and get your ass to an ocean.