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August 20 , 2006 :    The University of Arizona in Ponytails.

I was just at the U of A. That is the University of Arizona, NOT to be confused with their complete rivals, Arizona State University in Phoenix! God help you if you wore ANYTHING labeling you from the hated school in Phoenix, ASU, because our little college which is not so little at all enjoys beating them down in absolutely every possible competition.

I regret having to include the above statement but I am a person who KNOWS the rules so I had to include it. The statement above comes from my heart, the heart of a Tucsonian, who helped fight and scream to get on top of Phoenixs sad university. I proudly point out the U of As superiority to ASU, anywhere, and anytime. And I wont even START about the weather and ….. Okay, Ill leave off here. Obviously, anyone with half a brain and all of you have whole ones, (so far as I know,) can understand the facts. This makes me wonder about New Orleans where I had the pleasure to live for almost 4 or 5 years and enjoy performing there numerous times. New Orleans has both Loyola and Tulane NEXT DOOR to one another! Do they have fights back and forth? Do they throw eggs at each others dorms once a year as a ritual? This is worth looking into.

Back to my point about ponytails and general fashion watching at the University of Arizona. Ponytails on blondes with highlights seem to be the happenin do. If you have brown hair and you are ANYBODY, you had better have your hair up in that ponytail too! What happened here? What is going on to make the women/girls look like they are cast members of American Graffiti? Whoa! If you have short hair, it looks like you grab yourself some barrettes, bobby pins and whatever else you can to get that HAIR UP NOW, and hold back all the hair that is too short to obey the rubber band. That too: Use a rubber band, you know, the kind in the drug store covered with some sort of fabric? What Carrie and Sex in The City said holds true: NO SCRUNCHIES, EVER! I must say here that I have NO idea what made that writer go up in smoke and ruin the whole use of skrunchies, anyway! After all, they were good for your hair! I, myself, have never really had hair long enough to use a scrunchy but if I did and I saw a scrunchy that I was head over heels over, Id buck the system! Id wear that baby, and Id be proud to be part of it!

So, are we clear about wearing a ponytail if you are a heterosexual girl who is even thinking about getting friends, dates and even, yes, a lover! No ponytail, no cool-girl status and worse, you just might be hopeless unless a kind, pony tailed sister of yours takes pity on you and finds a way of getting you into the swing of things and pulls your do into that ponytail. Wanna go all the way? Highlight your hair with a hairdresser that is at least 200 dollars for highlights and THEN pop that beautiful hair up into that ponytail, and make it a high ponytail if you want to flirt. Oh yes, there is the fact of height of ponytail!

In my observation, the higher the ponytail, the flirtier the girl and the more expensive the clothes. Also, the thinner the girl, the higher the ponytail. Its as if the ponytail police, check you out in the morning on the scale and say, No, you are over by 2 pounds, lower that pony tail now! Or, you are shunned as you enter English 101, and you realize that your clothes are too low line for you to be wearing your ponytail as high as you are. How dare you! You slink out in shame, hit the first bathroom and lower your pony tail by at least an inch and one half! Damn right, say your sisters, You STAY in your place, girl! Indeed.

I must mention the radicals. Not everyone can wear a ponytail. I am a proud member of one group. One group is banned from wearing the ponytail by religion. There are those who refuse to follow fashion and by doing so, and shunning the pony tailed, are making a fashion statement themselves: Just say no, to pony tails. This group of women and girls feel themselves too good for trendy things and they wear their long hair down, and usually no color, and if their hair is colored, it is never highlighted, God forbid! Yes, the girls and women with the trendy blond, black, and blue hair, still wear ponytails. And then there is me, and there are those

like me. I am told that we are called: Glam Grunge Gamine. Yep. GGGs!

We are, I am told, just like you, meaning me. We wear our hair too short to make a ponytail unless it is on top of our heads! We can pull back the long tops of our little boy long, cuts and put a rubber band around them but THIS Gamine, would not think of it! No. We wear our hair in our eyes, or we push it out of our eyes, or both in one day. We may wear a newsboy cap. Our hair is just long enough to tuck behind our ears and we may do that. We also may play beatnik and put a head band and leave it close to the front. We go Andy Warhol, with dark eyes, (mine natural,) and no expression, (again, mine natural, I hold a ballet face by training.) We are all weights and heights. We wear what we want OVER what we want, thus called Grunge. We will wear expensive cotton T-shirts under cashmere and wear that with our pajama bottoms. We will wear a slip layered over another slip or for me, Ill wear a short-type dress with a T-shirt over it, or a thin dress over another dress. Layer, yes, but Im not going to wear polyester, I am allergic, ( I really am, but if I wasnt, Id choose the breathing cotton.) We are not afraid of red, or baby blue tights and if you are like me, you will say, Ill make it work, or I can wear this. and Im off, fast and out the door. Because we like Rolexes or a nice purse, they call us Glam Grunge.

Myself, I am too old and too me, to be called anything but my name. But, I fit in, I am told, and my stomach rocks. I do not show my stomach when I go out and havent for a long time. I became bored with it in dance class when teaching, doing choreography and running around like that at home. My tummy is for the most part, maybe rock, but its covered unless something slips up. (This DOES happen, I am the most accident-prone, clumsy dancer I EVER met.)

And so, ladies, women, girls and transgenders: UP with that hair, but remember this:

If you pull your hair too tight in a rubber band, later in life your hair could fall our. Keep it loose, ok, and only while its a trend, or:

Cut your hair! Join us with attitude. We dont bite, and we love flowers! We are even, (some of us,) girly! We just dont need all the props. If we do, we do what any smart woman does, we just get ourselves one of those high quality hair pieces and match out hair with it! We clip that hair on and swing the night away!

Check this idea that some have out as well:

Some people think that women have long hair for MEN. Do you thinks so?

I think some do. My opinion on that sort of thing is that if your man needs your hair long to feel like a man, he might check out his urges, if you know what I mean…

Annalisa, Spywoman