beliefs like the ones perpetuated and celebrated by popular artifacts like “Baywatch” ruined my life. Maybe not ruined, exactly, but definitely made harder. You see, it’s not easy to be a flat-chested, melanin-challenged brunette in a Malibu Barbie world. And nobody lets you forget it. Especially when you travel away from California. When I used to spend my summers in Tennessee with my grandparents, the locals would get all excited (as evidenced by literally announcing it in the paper) about the idea of a genuine beach bunny hopping on over to Lynchburg…and then look over my shoulder when we were introduced trying to find he
r. Not that I didn’t look familiar to these people--there was always a cousin Rebecca in Idaho or Mary in Kansas who was my spittin’-image twin--just not like the Hollywood pictures in their heads. Just once I would have loved to have one person, a single soul, say, “Oh, that makes so much sense!” when meeting me and finding out my home state, rather than, “Really? I would never have guessed.” But it does work both ways. When I traveled to Chicago for the first time, I was terrified of all the crime I would encounter and tucked money in ten different places, including both my shoes. Which proved completely unnecessary. In Marjorie Weinman Sharmat’s Gila monsters meet you at the airport, an East Coast boy gets a big surprise when he travels West. And yes, there are brunettes here.http://www.amazon.com/Gila-Monsters-Airport-Reading-Rainbow/dp/0689713835
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_W._Sharmat
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