Strong Aftershave

Now that my mother was bald she was experiencing liberation like never before.  I think of it like getting your driver's license and a new car on your 16th birthday, but my mother had managed to wreck every car she wrapped her hands around the steering wheel of, so she began biking everywhere.


It was a healthy addiction and I have to say she was in the best shape of her life.  She'd bike to the grocery store, church and to work and insisted on wearing dresses and high heels on these excursions.  The only thing that could have made her voyages more transcendent was if she still had her hair.  She grew heartsick over her lack of hair blowing in the wind, not to mention the noticeably crisp air gave her head quite a chill.  So my mother invested in an assortment of hats and wigs, most of which she found while rummaging through bins at second hand stores. Since she had head lice as a child and no longer had hair, she believed she was immune to it and was not intimidated by those pesky fleas.  (She is also not intimidated by athlete's foot apparently--again, another story for another time.)


She had a hat or wig in nearly every color and for nearly every occasion.  She literally became obsessed with hats and wigs.  She has a lot of weird obsessions, one of which being the Green Bay Packers, which I don't understand since she is not from Wisconsin, and has hardly ever been there and doesn't know a thing about football.  Yet, she had to buy herself a cheese head hat as well, but at least it was freshly sealed in it's original packaging.  She actually wanted to make her own cheese head out of old expired cheese she had laying around.  She said she could just scrape the mold off.  I had to explain to her that the hats were not "real" cheese and the poor woman burst into tears.


I had two favorite wigs though.  The Milli Vanilli with coordinating fake nose ring and the beaded Cleo. She called them something else though, as she named every single one of her wigs.  Most of them were named after books of the Bible.  She would try on all of her hats and wigs and take thousands of pictures of herself with these different looks. She wanted to figure out which ones she thought were most flattering and to experiment with different outfits to go with each. 
Her closet was overflowing with eccentricity.  She paired her beaded Cleo with a leopard spandex unitard (a leotard with full leggings--I'm not kidding here folks).  I cried myself to sleep that night, but snuck into her bedroom while she was sleeping, stole the cat suit and burned it.  She honestly should have been arrested for owning such an outfit.


As her hair started growing back, she donated most of her wigs to cancer patients (whom I'm assuming raised money by burning these wigs).  My mom vowed never to cut her hair again, but still couldn't kick the obsession with wigs from second hand stores.