Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Steak Sandwiches
by Matilda Schieren
To be a natural-born brunette means to live under a subtle, persistent veil of inferiority. This isn’t a pity cry or even a complaint, but simple fact.
Exhibit A: “If only my head looked more like a Snickers bar, one-note brown with maybe some caramel low-lights for good measure,” said no natural blonde scrolling through her selfie portfolio, ever.
Famous natural blondes (I’m looking at you Emma Stone and Laura Prepon) may go five-alarm fire red in the name of *brand-building* or a specific role, but they don’t go brunette. You know what Hollywood makes brunettes do to land roles? Shave their heads. Natalie Portman, Demi Moore and Robin Tunney are goddesses among mortals.
Exhibit B: As an adolescent or post-adolescent Jewish female, the inferiority complex is reinforced threefold. Your head is one in a sea of infinite darkness. If your bloodline skews Ashkenazi, you’re most likely pale – and that contrast only underscores the blandness framing your face. This is why ladies of the tribe are so quick to embrace the bottle (of developer). In certain pockets of certain upper-class neighborhoods, dying your God-given strands into hay is the rite of passage from girlie to Jewess in training.
Exhibit C: I came of age in the nineties and early aughts, which means that all of the daydreams I’ve had about falling in love and/or performing a bold rendition of “Born to Run” in front of a large audience are a reflection of the pedestal upon which I place pop culture narratives. And if you look across the pop culture canon from my formative years, you’ll find that The Makeover Motif is heavily skewed toward women with dark locks.
Mia Thermopolous, Princess of Genovia and arguably Anne Hathaway’s most successful screen appearance, morphs from frizzy pyramid-topped nerd to A+ blow-out royalty. (Thus becoming an apt foil to the villainous Mandy Moore and her honey tresses.) At least one brunette on every OG season of America’s Next Top Model gets Tyra’s extreme platinum treatment (double-whammy when they go blonde and get served the Mia Farrow/Rosemary’s Baby pixie.)
By the time I was 18, a college freshman and still beholden to a brown mop, my blonde ambitions were hyperactive. I was high off the rare, newfound liberty of living outside my parents’ bubble for the first time in my life. I was free to eat breakfast cereal that wasn’t a shade of beige...and make it my dessert course for every meal. Free to roam around with friends late into the night, off campus, even if just a mile down the road for ice cream.
So when Chris and Claire, my two closest high school friends and first and only couples therapy patients, made the pilgrimage from South Jersey to Villanova for an impromptu visit, the stage was set for rash decisions.
The afternoon began harmlessly enough. That’s to say, a continuation of everything we did in high school: walk around, find the nearest coffee shop to bicker in, smoke filtered cigarettes. And then we found our way into CVS.
Drug stores, the most innocuous form of retail, become playgrounds rampant with risk, opportunity and instant gratification between the ages of 13 and 21. When you’re an 18 year-old girl in a drug store with your best friends, vibrating from caffeine and nicotine, buying a box of L’Oreal Preference in some God-forsaken shade like “golden natural blonde” seems like sweet, rebellious, reasonably priced destiny.
So I forked over the $9--or rather, paid with my preloaded Wildcard rather than my debit to throw my parents off the scent of polyglyceryl--and we decamped to the third floor of Katherine Hall.
A 200 square foot, fluorescently lit cinderblock room adorned in movie art postcards and Target’s grooviest dormwear was not the makeover setting I may have dreamt at 15, but it was the makeover setting we had. Sitting in my wood standard-issue desk chair in front of a floor length, back of door mirror, I watched Claire meticulously douse my head. My roommate strolled in at some point (an oddity considering she napped through most things, including normal meal times and fire drills) and we waited.
Word travelled quickly around the women’s floor, and by dinnertime a gaggle of neighbors had assembled in a friend’s room waiting for the big reveal. This was starting to feel more like the daydream.
After a quick rinse and blowdry, the new me was fully realized. She wasn’t as severely platinum as a Gwen Stefani or a Debbie Harry or a 2017-ish Kim Kardashian. To be perfectly honest, she was much more...ochre, than anything else. But she was new and unfamiliar and at 18 years old I had no choice but to own it.
The women of the third floor oohed and cooed over my copper head. I won’t even begin to pretend that the loving attention didn’t feel good to someone who had gained the freshman 15 in the first semester alone (and would rack up another 10 before the year was up). Even hearing Wayne, the second or third object of my freshman affection, call me Gerard (as in lead singer of My Chemical Romance who went platinum around the third record) as I strolled through the business school building felt like bliss.
A few weeks later, with my roots starting to seep out, the thrill of strolling across campus as a newly minted blonde gave way to increasing anxiety.
Spring break was near. My dad, the parent who would admonish me (by way of my mom) for wearing red lipstick to high school, would be collecting me soon enough for the two-hour trek back to South Jersey, and now ritual pit stop at Dalessandro’s for steak sandwiches.
In true Jewish parent fashion, he was early. Tromping back to my dorm after the last class before break, I could see the Chevy Impala from yards away. My footsteps and heart palpitations fell in lockstep. I likely contemplated taking a hard right and flouncing myself onto the high-speed rail tracks that bisected campus.
The closer I got, the more I realized that my neurosis was, momentarily, unwarranted. As my dad registered that the short girl with banana boat hair was his blue-eyed, 5’2” progeny, his Philadelphia Smile Contest-winning grin emerged. “Ya went blonde!” he said and giggled, while bear-hugging me.
Days on end of neurosis and dread amounted to literally nothing. (A few months later, after only one quick and dirty reapplication of boxed dye, there was an inevitable meltdown over the brass helmet my head had become.) But for this afternoon, all was fine – fortunately for me, because lingering panic would have cramped my favorite pre-break routine.
The drive from campus back to South Jersey was rarely more than two hours, but my parents and I had become accustomed to stopping less than 20 minutes into the eastbound trek for steak sandwiches. You’re probably thinking that last line was a mistake because, you’d assume, any sandwich consumed in and around the Philadelphia city limits by law is blanketed with cheese (regardless of where it falls on the natural to artificial spectrum).
Well, yous guys are wrong.
Dalessandro’s, a small shop in a residential area miles north of the art museum steps, and even farther from Pat’s and Geno’s warring neon signs, is where my dad and I opted exclusively for steak sandwiches. What their sandwich lacks in dairy it compensates for in width, length and girth. It’s the East Coast roll you know fighting to corral heaps of chopped ribeye and onions in a volume you never thought possible on Passyunk Avenue. It needs nothing, but can easily accommodate streaks of ketchup or exceptionally fiery crushed peppers. It’s absolutely the wrong thing to eat before sitting in the car for an hour and a half drive down the shore, and the only thing that feels right after holding your breath for days in nervous anticipation.
***
Hair grows out. Soon enough I was back to brunette, ignorant of the short window of time I’d have left with a head unadulterated by gray. Since my freshman year episode I’ve had no urge to dye my hair anything, outside of a vow to – once middle aged and completely gray – pursue a tasteful pastel pink.
Most brunettes have to dabble as blondes the same way that most eaters choose to cross paths with a cheesesteak. If we didn’t, we’d never appreciate how satisfying the unassuming option could be.
About the Author: Matilda Schieren is a writer and B2B marketer based in Oak Park, Illinois. She’s a proud Villanova alumna and devout Philadelphia sports fan who takes cheesesteak evangelism quite seriously.