In Case of Emergency, Do Not Call 9-1-1

Back in March, Dave spent a couple of days in the hospital after suffering stroke-like symptoms. He underwent a CAT scan, chest X-ray, MRI, Doppler, stress test, blood work and something called a TEE, which basically involved having a microscopic camera shoved down his throat to take pictures of his heart. We walked away with a prescription for aspirin.

And some big, fat bills.

Dr. Glassenberg, the neurosurgeon, would like us or our insurance company to remit $200 for his consultative expertise, which consisted of him asking Dave to squeeze his hands—a procedure half a dozen nurses had performed free of charge—and grasping at straws, including attributing Dave’s symptoms to migraines, which Dave doesn’t get.

Dr. Kim, our attending physician, would like us or our insurance company to remit $550 for her services, which consisted of popping in on us once a day to see if we were still hanging around, thereby earning her another $125, and grasping at straws, including the possibility that Dave’s symptoms were all in his head (which I suppose could give a person a migraine).

Swedish Covenant Hospital would like us or our insurance company to remit $26,315.35 for various amenities: $4,346 for Laboratory Services, $3,510 for a Diag. Medical Exam (if that refers to the TEE I’m pretty sure they owe us), and so on. Our tab also included $3,190 for a two-night stay in a room without walls or a private bathroom. I knew we should have checked into a Hyatt. For that kind of coin, we could have spent a week in Cancun, although the result likely would have been the same—we both came home with some sort of intestinal thing, which is what happens when you share a toilet with people hospitalized for diarrhea.

Fine. Whatever. I expected that we or our insurance company would be bilked out of significant sums of money by the health care industry. I did not anticipate what arrived in the mail yesterday.

The City of Chicago Department of Revenue is charging us $433 for Emergency Ambulance Service from the Chicago Fire Department. That’s right, when my husband woke me up at 5 a.m. to tell me the left side of his body had gone numb, I dialed 9-1-1. And now the City wants remuneration for responding to the call.

Um, excuse me, isn’t that included in our taxes? You know, the $75 City Sticker fee we fork over every year for the privilege of parking on side streets where our car gets dinged on a daily basis. The 8.75% sales tax added onto all of our purchases. The $2,500 in property taxes. I thought that pretty much covered police, fire, snow removal, water filtration, fireworks on the 4th of July and tulips along Michigan Avenue. Doesn’t City Hall have plenty of other revenue streams, like parking meters and bribes? Do they really need to extract additional dollars from people frightened that a loved one is about to die?

Why stop there? Want the cops to investigate a crime? That’ll be $200 for assaults, $450 for robberies, $1,500 for homicides. You want streetlights on at night, take up a neighborhood collection. You want to ride your bike or go for a run along the lakefront path, that’ll be a $15 usage fee. You want to send your kid to a Chicago Public School, be prepared to pony up tuition.

I returned the bill to the City of Chicago Department of Revenue and provided our insurance information, as requested. I noticed that the $433 included $8 for mileage—the one mile from our house to the hospital. The next time Dave scares the crap out of me with a potentially life-threatening illness, I’ll drive him to the ER myself and park for $5. I won’t even ask him to pay me back. With the cash that we save, we can buy a lifetime's supply of aspirin.

A Penny Saved Is a Penny Spent

This weekend, I was reminded of one of my pet peeves: People who load their CTA fare cards one nickel at a time.

I’m not talking about commuters with $1.50 on tap, looking to beef up their total by a quarter to the required buck seventy-five. I’m talking about those infuriating individuals who plunk in three, four or five dollars worth of change, excavated coin by coin from the bottoms of their purses or pockets.

Metallic money was meant to be saved, not spent, for the sole reason that its usage slows transactions to a crawl. Get behind one of these dilly-dallyers—who are impervious to the sighing hordes behind them—and it’s a sure bet you’ll miss your train by fractions of a second.

Imagine the number of people who wind up late for a job interview or first date, having whiled away precious seconds waiting for Ms. Slowpoke to boost her fare card tally to $8.15. Lives have been ruined, loves have been lost all because of a dime rejected by the coin feeder, and re-inserted time after time after maddening time.

I, on the other hand, was taught to hoard my change.

First, a gal must identify a suitable container for her booty. In the ninth grade, I served as homeroom rep for my school’s annual fundraiser. The duties largely consisted of collecting my classmates’ purchase orders for whatever superfluous objects we were hawking to family and neighbors. For my efforts, I was rewarded with a bank in the shape of a giant Tootsie Roll. Initially stuffed with candy, the bank was quickly depleted of its contents, the void to be filled by change. I carried this memento into adulthood, a sad testament to the dearth of other prizes earned in my glory years at Fassett Junior High. Eventually I traded up to a sizeable Ball jar, which holds more coins and curbs my appetite for sweets.

Once the change reaches maximum occupancy in said receptacle, it is taken to the bank and redeemed for “fun money.” These are the rules as set forth by my father.

My dad is a genius at a number of things: exaggerating any statement by at least 60 percent, muttering not quite under his breath, driving 18 hours without making a single pit stop. But he truly excelled at the art of saving change. It was a privilege to watch the master at work. We’d saunter into an establishment, McDonald’s perhaps, looking like every other mild-mannered suburban family. We’d place our order and the cashier would announce the damage: “That’ll be $12.01.” Ka-ching! Rather than produce the single cent, Dad would giddily hold out his hand for three quarters, two dimes and four pennies, which he later would deposit in the glass milk jug stored in his closet.

When the jug was bursting to capacity, it was time to roll the change, which became an annual family event. We’d gather in the kitchen, my father in his customary position at the head of the table, coins strewn in front of us, the proportion of silver to copper an immediate clue as to the success of this year’s haul. We’d plunk the coins into their corresponding paper sleeves—$10 in quarters, $5 in dimes, $2 in nickels, .50 for pennies—tapping them into place with the eraser end of a pencil. The grand total ran into the hundreds of dollars, and tens of pounds.

While the collecting of the change was my father’s domain, the depositing of it fell to my mother. Walking into a financial institution with a load of rolled coins has all the appeal of shopping with food stamps. The tellers are not happy to see you and affect the sort of snobbish attitude that clerks at Tiffany’s reserve for customers purchasing trinkets from the jeweler’s affordable line of silver baubles. Mom suffered the ignominy in silence, much in the way that she ate every piece of bread crust while the rest of us tore into fresh loaves.

The coins had now been converted into spendable cash—our mad money that would fund all forms of merriment on summer jaunts to East Coast beach resorts in the Carolinas and Virginia. That glass milk jar was our ticket to ice cream cones of both the soft and hard variety, rounds of miniature golf and trips to the iron-on T-shirt shop. Without it, we would have been back in Ohio swatting fireflies with our tennis rackets and smearing the glowing guts on the driveway for special effect.

My dad stopped saving change when General Motors introduced a rewards card. Papa wants a new Buick, so my parents began charging items that once would have reaped a bonanza of coins. The romance of “$12.01” now seems about as quaint as soda fountains and sock hops.

But I still have my Ball jar, which Dave and I contribute to regularly. Last summer, we cashed it out and hit the road. We found ourselves in Montana, licking ice cream cones along a mountain lake on a blazing blue July evening.

Doesn’t that beat a ride on the CTA?

50 Is the New 25

I’ve come across “middle aged” twice in the past week—first in a novel, and again in a short story. On both occasions it stopped me cold. The term was being used to describe characters roughly my age.

I took offense.

No one wants to be middle aged, a way station for the Not Young awaiting final transport to Old Age. I suppose that’s why the phrase has been lying low of late. I suspect the Baby Boomers, given their obsession with perpetual youth, have been working diligently to scrub it from the language, replacing it with “50 is the new 25.”

As a member of the cohort immediately following the Boomers, I usually find them a distasteful lot, picturing a future some 30 years hence when I cash my $12 monthly Social Security stipend, stamped “Sorry. The Boomers were here. Sincerely, U.S. Treasury.” But if they have managed to single-handedly eradicate middle aged from the lexicon, well all I can say is “Jolly good show.”

When my Mom was 39—the same age I am now—I was 14 years old. I didn’t think she was middle aged, I considered her positively ancient. I have since revised my opinion: 39 is fine, 39 is prime, 39 is better than 40.

I don’t look middle aged. I think it’s because I’ve studiously avoided smiling most of my life, which has drastically reduced the appearance of laugh lines.

I don’t feel middle aged. In my teens, I couldn’t run a mile to save my life. Last week I registered for the Chicago Marathon.

I don’t act middle aged. What could be less mature than shopping at Old Navy and watching “South Park”? Although I do confess that when confronted with a pack of pale-faced high school Goths, I want to shake these girls and scream, “Your skin will never be softer or more elastic. Scrape off the pancake make-up—there’ll be plenty of time for that later.”

In short, I am not ready to be put out to pasture, to become demographically irrelevant, or to have sales clerks call me “ma’am.” For god’s sake, I just figured out how to style my hair. It can’t all be downhill from here.

And then I was confronted with incontrovertible evidence that 50 is not the new 25, and 39 is certainly not the new 12. My husband has high cholesterol. Nothing like a prescription for Zocor to shatter girlish illusions.

Birthdays used to be fun—at 16 you could drive, at 18 you could vote, at 21 you could drink. At 40, you’re rewarded with dietary restrictions and annual mammograms. At 50, toss in colonoscopies. Whoopee! How ironic that the very health care system that’s supposed to promote long life is the same one that makes us feel one step closer to the grave.

I remember the days of yore—the ’80s, I believe—when my dad discovered he had high cholesterol. Pre-Lipitor, my mom’s solution was to combat the condition with poultry.

Every night we’d gather at the dinner table for another round of “Beef. It’s not what’s for dinner.” There was skinless, boneless, tasteless chicken. Turkey burgers. Turkey hot dogs. Turkey meatloaf.

We kids weren’t playing. Did we want Dad to undergo quadruple bypass at some non-specified point in the future? Probably not. Were we prepared to suffer along with him? Hell no. Pass the King Dongs.

Now I’m the one scrupulously studying food labels, zeroing in on saturated and trans fats. I’m not sure how this happened. Worrying about things like clogged arteries and heart disease and stroke is what Old People like my parents do. Never mind that in the Turkey Era, my father was probably younger than my husband is now. (If this time-space continuum mind bender makes sense to you, enjoy “Back to the Future III.”)

Talk about feeling middle aged, entire conversations with my dad have revolved around the fact that Zocor isn’t available as a generic. When I complained that Dave’s drug plan charged him $40 for a month’s supply, Pops was not entirely sympathetic. “You think that’s bad? It costs my friend Chuck $120.” Dad and most of his golfing buddies lost their health insurance along with their jobs in a company merger a few years ago. They’re all under 65 and self-insured. I believe my father knows the precise number of days left until he’s eligible for Medicare.

So when Dave’s doctor switched him to Crestor right after he’d refilled his bottle of Zocor, we knew what to do with the unused pills. We’d donate them to Chuck.

Us old folks gotta stick together.

It’s My Escrow and I’ll Pay If I Want To

My new favorite billboards at “L” stations come courtesy of Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center. “For a better ER experience, experience a better ER.”

Does anyone in the midst of a medical crisis seriously weigh their emergency room options? Like, which waiting room has the most comfortable chairs to sit in for the six or seven hours?

By its very definition, a trip to the ER is not the sort of thing you stop and ponder ahead of time.

Husband: “Dearest, should I have a coronary attack during dinner, please be sure to drive me to Illinois Masonic. I know it’s all the way across town, but I hear the staff does wonders with chest compressions.”

Wife: “Truly, I hear it’s a better ER experience.”

Back in the real world, the decision is more likely to revolve around: where the ambulance deposits you, where your HMO will cover services, whatever hospital is closest to the place where you sliced off your finger.

Yet hospitals, along with utility companies, continue to pour money into marketing campaigns, as if the mere act of advertising puts the consumption of electricity or health care on par with the excitement of buying a new car. Why do they bother? My guess: They want us to feel that it was somehow our decision to have them sock us with exorbitant fees.

Illinois Masonic: “Thank you so much for letting us reattach your pinkie finger. We know you could have gone to any other emergency room in the city. But you chose us because of our brilliant “L” signage. It really meant a lot. Sorry that we were out of network. That will be $35,000.”

Ms. Patient: “#%*! That’s outrageous!”

Illinois Masonic: “I’ll tell you what’s outrageous—your attitude. You’re the one who couldn’t live without her finger. We flavored your IV with chocolate, sewed your stitches in the shape of a smiley face, and assigned the really cute single doctor to your case. For another $10,000, we can get him to ask for your phone number. You won’t find a better ER experience than that.”

Hospitals know we hate them. Same with the electric, phone and gas companies—especially the gas company. We resent having to spend hard-earned dollars on heat and dial tone and good health—things we hold true as inalienable rights—when we’d much rather buy another pair of strappy sandals. So they try to get us to like them by softening the blow.

The bank just sent us our annual escrow statement. I appreciated the little “what is an escrow account” box for those of us who’ve always wondered. But I still don’t grasp how it’s calculated. Nevertheless, we have such an account and it apparently requires additional funds for reasons that will remain murky to me until the day I die, when, assuming I’m headed heavenward, St. Peter will ask me which of the world’s great mysteries I would like to have revealed. I will respond, “1.What really happened to the dinosaurs? 2. Why did my hair always look great the day before I got it cut? 3. How does escrow work?”

The bank tells us that in order to bring our escrow account into balance, “you may pay the shortage in full (Option A) or pay the shortage over 12 months (Option B). It’s your choice.”

Actually, no, it’s not my choice. If I had my druthers, I would opt for Plan C: not to pay the shortage at all. But that’s not on the table, now is it, so spare me the sugar coating.

Imagine a world of straight-talkers. From the bank: “We don’t care how you pay your escrow shortage. Just pay it. Or we’ll repossess your home.”

Or this, from the hospital: “If you’re in the neighborhood and happen to be bleeding and we’re a member of your insurance plan, we’ll see what we can do.”

Or this, from the gas company: “Know anyone else who can deliver natural gas to your home? We didn’t think so. Screw you.”

* * *

More Un-Truths in Advertising

Apple’s iPod is a wondrous invention. Truth.

But those gyrating go-go dancers featured in iPod commercials bear no resemblance to reality. No way the headphones will remain in place while you violently toss your head side to side and up and down. No way the headphones will remain in place while you stand still.

I like to go running with my iPod—it’s helped me shave seven or eight minutes off my total time. Imagine how much faster I would be if I weren’t constantly slowing to shove each ear piece back into place every few hundred feet.

The Fly: Part Deux

I Swiffered up the seventh confirmed fly carcass yesterday afternoon, although we haven’t had any airborne sightings since last Friday. Unlike the Texas border, we seem to have successfully blocked the point of entry.

It appears I’m the one to blame for the infestation.

With temperatures consistently in the 60s and 70s a couple of weeks ago, I determined it was safe to remove the plastic insulation from our windows, in obvious violation of the First Commandment of Chicago Residency: Thou shalt not worship false Springs. A plague of flies was sent as my penance.

Once I peeled off the plastic, I couldn’t help but notice the grimy film covering the windows. Normally I would ignore the dirt. This method has served me well in the past, particularly when it comes to whatever lurks in the teeny space the builder thought to leave between my bathroom vanity and the wall. To scrub this area, I would need to rig some sort of contraption featuring a toothbrush. Not gonna happen. But every once in a while a nagging voice tells me that I am a bad, bad wife for dropping the ball on things like ironing, cooking and window washing. So I grabbed a roll of paper towels and a bottle of glass cleaner and set to work.

It wasn’t a particularly difficult job. Our windows easily tilt inward; in fact, that was one of the selling points when we purchased the condo. Why, I’m not exactly sure. It’s one of those “amenities” real estate agents use to mesmerize first-time homebuyers, instead of pointing out useful information like “there’s absolutely no soundproofing between floors in this building” or “all of your electrical outlets are pointed in the wrong direction to accommodate plug-in air fresheners.”

My first spring as the bona fide owner of a six-figure bank loan, I felt compelled to take the tilt-a-windows out for a spin. That was four years ago, which would make window washing a quadrennial event, same as the Olympics. As with Luge, I see no reason to increase the frequency of the activity.

There’s a certain fun to be had in cleaning something that’s really, really filthy, sort of like a before-and-after makeover. Would you rather see the results on a woman who hasn’t cut her hair since 1963, or Cindy Crawford? As I wiped down the windows, the paper towels came away blackened. When I put the panes back in place, I was startled by the clarity of the view, like the day I got my first pair of glasses. I was reminded of an old “Benny Hill” skit in which the title character fakes blindness, and then a miraculous recovery. “I can see, I can see. Blimey, I can see.”

The process became a little less entertaining with each successive window (we have about 12 altogether) until it turned into downright drudgery. I guess I got a little careless and failed to lock one of the windows completely back into place. This lapse went unnoticed until gale force winds blew into town late last week. I thought it was a bit drafty in our spare bedroom/office, but chalked it up to shoddy construction and threw on another sweater. Dave reasoned that our windows were crappy, but not that crappy, and devoted the necessary five seconds to making sure they were actually closed. Thus was solved the Mystery of the Flies.

Or not. But it’s a great excuse to pass on window washing in 2010.

Lord of the Flies

Bed bugs may be the pest du jour, but the common fly can hold its own on the disgusting scale.

We’ve had a half dozen of the insects infest the condo over the past couple of days. Or it’s possible that there have only been two, and we keep killing the same ones over and over again only to have them make like Lazarus to disrupt our sleep and the watching of “Oprah.”

I spotted the first one yesterday morning. It was potbellied and fearsome. Among its powers: a surprising nimbleness despite its girth, and a cloak of invisibility that enabled it to escape death-by-magazine at every turn.

I ceded Buzz the kitchen and dining and living rooms and spent the rest of the day on terror alert lest he infiltrate my work space. Occasional reconnaissance forays proved futile. Whenever Buzz deigned to show his face, I attempted to shoo him out the door, but flies are not exactly herdable.

When Dave came home from work, I skipped the usual kiss-and-how-was-your-day routine.

“There’s a fly in the house.”

“Did you spray it?”

Damn. I had forgotten about the can of poison sitting on a shelf in the pantry. They may be outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, but as far as I can tell, chemical weapons are perfectly acceptable according to our condo association bylaws.

Dave gassed Buzz and assured me that my nemesis was off in a corner somewhere slowly asphyxiating to death. We cooked a lovely dinner, I settled in for a very special “Everwood” and then we went to bed.

I decided to read for a bit, and that’s when Fly #2 began circling the nightstand lamp. Or he could have been Fly #1, somehow immune to Hot Shot Flying Insect Killer.

“Goddammit. I thought you said you killed it.”

I sprang out of bed, barricaded myself in the spare room—shoving a pair of Dave’s jeans into the gap between the door and the floorboards—and waited for my man to do his job. I reflected on the absurdity of the situation. I had been held hostage all day—and now, perhaps, all night—by a fly. On a scale of 1 to 10, I was an off-the-chart weenie. I’ve seen PBS specials—half the planet is overrun by the insect. Do Africans cower in their homes? No, they ignore the pest. Why, I’m practically a poster child for a bin Laden rant against the infidel Americans who expect to live in a world without flies.

Dave reported back: “I can’t see it. I’m going to sleep.”

I pictured Buzz crawling on my skin or nesting in my hair overnight and conveyed my dissatisfaction with that particular course of action. He returned shortly with a carcass. After flushing #1 or #2 down the toilet, we called it a night.

Morning brought #3 and #4. Dave Hot-Shotted #3 (which could have been #1) and listened for his death rails. Number 4 was trapped in a window pane. I secured the latch, just in case he had any ideas, with the intent of suffocating him. The only flaw in my plan being that he’s trapped between glass and a screen, with plenty of not-so-fresh Chicago air to sustain his hopefully short life. If anything, I imagine #4 will die of sheer boredom. I’m prepared to wait him out.

I had just come back from a morning run when I heard #5. Or was it the last gasps of #3/#1, whose body was never found? He was hiding behind a living room blind. Thinking Dave was perhaps a bit stingy with the Hot Shot, I blitzed #5/#3/#1 with several sprays, checked in on #4 and went about my day.

Number six really pissed me off, or was it #6/#5/#3/#1. (Really, we have been appallingly lax on follow through. Where are all the corpses? That’s what I like about #4. I know where he stands.) This guy entered the No Fly Zone—the spare room/office. Here was where I would make my last stand. I grabbed all the weaponry in my arsenal: Hot Shot and a complimentary copy of Cuisine on loan from my mother. I swatted and sprayed, swatted and sprayed, swatted and sprayed. I turned on the ceiling fan, aiming to bash him with the paddles. Eventually he fell to the floor. I watched him in his death throes, convulsing on the hardwood. Sometimes, diplomacy is not an option. Sometimes, you’ve got to go nuclear.

I laid down the Cuisine (sorry Mom, not getting this one back) and stomped my foot. He was definitively, categorically, unequivocally, positively dead. Number 4—I’m coming for you next.

Something Fishy

My apologies to all people with peanut allergies. The lactose and gluten intolerant. Sufferers of Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

I have considered you malingerers. Mocked your conditions as psychosomatic. Blamed you for the proliferation of soy products and the absence of decent snacks on airplanes.

I take it all back.

On Friday night, I was trolling celebrity web sites and contemplating whether or not to polish off the last spoonfuls of French vanilla ice cream. Dave was watching “Cops” or the Cubs, the former being a guilty pleasure and the latter a fool’s errand. I heard him say my name in that tone of voice that means “the rest of the evening’s going to suck.”

He had brought home Chinese for dinner—rice with vegetables and shrimp. Lately, he’s been complaining that shrimp makes his tongue itch. But with beef off the menu thanks to a recent diagnosis of high cholesterol, he was trying to work healthier proteins into his diet.

On the night in question, the shrimp did not make his tongue itch. It made it swell, along with his lips. His face turned red and he broke out in hives on his chest; his entire back looked like a third-degree sunburn. It appears the boy has developed an adult-onset food allergy.

I clicked off celebrity-babies.com and Googled “treatment for shrimp allergy.” At foodallergy.org, I learned all about the way the immune system creates antibodies to ward off harmful substances. I was also given a run-down of potential symptoms, in addition to swelling, hives and itchiness:
* difficulty breathing
* vomiting
* abdominal cramps
* diarrhea
* loss of consciousness
* death

Death. That’s one way to get a non-believer’s attention. I started scrolling faster looking for anything with the heading “treatment,” which is what I had asked god damn Google to search for in the first place.

Ah, here it was. The best treatment for a food allergy: strict avoidance of the allergy-causing food. Um, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. And a little too late in the game to be effective.

Oh, I’m sorry Google. What I meant to ask for was information on the treatment of an allergic reaction. That would be epinephrine, a.k.a. adrenaline, available by prescription as a “self-injectable device.” I imagine Dave and I had a fair amount of adrenaline on tap Friday night, alas none of it in a syringe. We debated a trip to the emergency room but settled on a drive to the drugstore, where we purchased some Benadryl. For the record, not a single web site I visited mentioned Benadryl. I’d be happy to consult with the company on a new ad campaign.

The rest of the evening’s entertainment went as follows:
Me: Are you having trouble breathing?
Him: No.
Me: Are you feeling nauseous?
Him: No.
Me: Are you dead?
Him: No.

We watched the migration of the hives as they traveled from Dave’s torso down to his feet. Because his tongue was still swollen, I tried to get him to say words that ended in “-st.” Just for kicks. The next morning, he was right as rain, but the leftovers were marked for the dumpster.

So it’s good-bye to shrimp, lobster and any other member of the shellfish family, which I’m sure I and the airline industry can accommodate. But the second he comes down with an aversion to wheat, I’m outta here.

Brunette Is the New Blonde

As a woman who wears glasses, barely tops five feet and eats, I will never see a reasonable facsimile of my personhood strutting down a catwalk. But my hair is suddenly fashionable.

According to the folks at Redken, who I have no reason not to trust, “this season, a runway favorite [in hair color] is brown.” To which I can only say, it’s about time.

The brown-haired, brown-eyed combo has been a one-way ticket to Dullsville. Back in 1967, Van Morrison threw us a bone with “Brown Eyed Girl.” It’s been an awfully long dry spell ever since.

Picture Marilyn Monroe as a brunette—her name is Norma Jean. No, better to be blonde, and better still to be blonde and blue-eyed. On the opposite end of the color spectrum, the darkest-tressed amongst us earn their share of props. Does the phrase “raven-haired beauty” ring any bells? Even redheads have a certain curb appeal—they’re fun, flirty and fiery. The adjective most frequently paired with brown? I believe that would be “mousy.”

Now we’re trendy. While the attention was flattering at first, it’s become annoying.

The “magnificent” Katie Holmes is a Brownie. Two of the four “Desperate Housewives” are brunettes (well, possibly all four, but only their colorists know for sure). Between them, Teri Hatcher and Eva Longoria have single-handedly cured me of my addiction to “Access Hollywood” and driven me to reconsider my negative stance on highlighting. Ladies: Brunettes are smart and level-headed, not attention-grabbing nut jobs. Get your stereotypes straight.

Since we’ve gone Hollywood, “basic brown” no longer suffices to capture the radiance, some might say luminosity, of our once-scorned locks.

The brain trust at Redken offers up shades of “mahogany” and “cinnamon.” Pantene’s Brunette Expressions line ranges from “toffee to almond” and “nutmeg to dark chocolate.” My homeboy John Frieda’s Brilliant Brunette shampoos and conditioners go from “amber to maple” and “chestnut to espresso.”

Truly, I would need a Crayola 128-pack (with built-in sharpener) to compare nutmeg to maple. It’s like the marketers at these companies spent their morning staring at a Starbucks menu board and the afternoon trolling supermarket candy aisles.

The amount of time I spend debating whether I have light dark-brown hair (I guess that would be chestnut) or dark light-brown hair (I guess that would be maple) is absurd. I could be volunteering at a soup kitchen, solving the health care crisis, or choosing a better wrinkle-reducing cream.


Because Frieda’s ads caught my eye first, I’ve become a Brilliant Brunette disciple. I opted for chestnut over maple solely because I love Christmas songs (“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…) and hate maple syrup and candy, which might be one of the few sweets that I find disgusting, along with caramel popcorn balls and Peeps.

But if Pantene can come up with a way to blend dark chocolate with toffee—let’s call it Heath Bar—they’ve got a new customer.

***

Luminous Update
Because I’m intrigued by all things “luminous,” I purchased John Frieda’s Luminous Color Glaze (an extension of Brilliant Brunette). It promised to add a touch of color, a boost of shine and a glossy luxurious feel.

Does it deliver? Well, my hair is glossier and shinier—assuming there’s an actual difference between these two terms. It could be the Color Glaze, or it could be that I’ve been growing my hair out and using less luster-sucking styling product.

The color does seem brighter. Again, it could be the Color Glaze or the fact that it’s May and I’ve finally set my hair free from hoods and hats to bask in the sun.

“Luxurious feel”? Um, no. My hair feels soft and…flat. Which is what happens to fine hair when it meets a…conditioner.

***

Luminous Sighting
In Style, May issue, pg. 384, “Get Ready for Summer”: Make skin luminous with a drop of iridescent shimmer cream mixed into a tinted moisturizer.