I didn’t have her skin.  I didn’t have her teeth.  I didn’t have her body.  And I certainly didn’t have her hair.  But for a couple years back in the late 1970s, I, along with about twenty million other women who somewhere deep inside themselves still believed in the existence of miracles, did have her haircut.

               Unfortunately, there’s only so far a blow dryer and a round hairbrush can take you on the journey towards goddess stature.  On Farrah, “the Farrah,” as the cut was called, looked like the mane of a magnificent lioness.  On me, it looked like the mane of a magnificent afghan hound.  Farrah undoubtedly had more hair clogging the drain of her bathroom sink on any given day than I had on my head, even after I started faithfully using Wella Balsam conditioner, a product that featured Farrah prominently in its advertisements.  The last thing extremely fine hair needs, especially when it’s been razor cut into a Farrah, is something that will weigh it down further, such as a creamy substance made from the resin of pine bark.  But as one who’s been bombarded by advertisements for hair care products since earliest childhood, when I was first forced to ponder whether it really was true that blondes had more fun, I am hard-wired to believe in anything I am told by clever copywriters, which is why right at this very moment there are something on the order of 75 different hair care products jammed into my bathroom cupboard, everything from texturizing gels and seaweed conditioning packs to spray-on glossers and color-enhancing shampoos.  And my hair doesn’t look any more like Farrah’s now than it did $2,000 ago.   

 I still remember the first time I saw her.  It was in that now-famous Noxzema commercial, the one where she shaves the face of NFL star Joe Namath.

 “Hi, I’m creamy,” it began, speaking of clever copywriters.

 I happened to be in the bar of a Northern Michigan ski lodge at the time, and every man in the place suddenly assumed the same peculiarly rapt expression that a dog gets when confronted with a platter of sizzling T-bone steaks.  My new boyfriend, who sat next to me drooling into his glass of Blue Nun, was no exception, which didn’t help my mood.  While he and his buddies had passed an enjoyable day barreling down the black diamond run, I’d been marooned over on the bunny slope trying, with very limited success, to get a handle on the snowplow.  My muscles were sore, my ego bruised, and my hair flattened by a day spent under a reindeer stocking cap.  I studied the blonde on the TV, who looked as though she had never experienced a minute of hat head in her life.

 Farrah was the kind of girl that star quarterbacks fell in love with.  I was the kind of girl that star quarterbacks copied homework assignments from.

 I did ultimately dump that boyfriend, though Farrah wasn’t so easy to shake.  The next guy to come into my life had the famous Farrah poster tacked to the door of his bedroom closet.  But I’d sort of gotten used to sharing my boyfriends with her by then. 

 After awhile, I even learned to appreciate Farrah, without those terrible pangs of envy and self-loathing, sort of like the way a well-adjusted house sparrow must feel when it comes upon a spectacular-looking flamingo.  We all have our niche in this world.

 Some of us were born to grapple with split ends and cowlicks; others born to launch a thousand snips.