Before and After

Behold the power of Pantene!

This is my shockingly red hair the night I got it done, a week and a half ago. This was the night that my dry hair stained my pillowcase:

Now, after shampooing twice a day every day, it's a much warmer shade with both toned-down red and blonde highlights:

Thank goodness. Cuz that red was just not something I could live with. I still think the guy did a piss-poor job on the cut and I'm planning on getting it trimmed and reshaped again in a few weeks. But finally the color is looking pretty good. Which means it's starting to look again like it did BEFORE I had the nightmare hair appointment. This whole experience was one of the biggest wastes of money of my whole life.

Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead

Last weekend, several of us took in Studio Theatre's production of Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead. This play asks us what might happen if those lovable little tykes in the Peanuts strips grow up to become surly, clique-ish, hormone-driven teenagers. The premise offers a lot of funny plot possibilities, and then - typical of contemporary theater - it's sure to bring in a few "issues" too.

Charlie Brown is now CB, a totally predictable, conformist sporto lunkhead. His sister Sally adopts a new fad of the week, and she's currently a Wiccan performance artist. Linus is now Van, a stoner who smoked the ashes of his blanket (out of spite, really, since it was his friends who set it on fire). Peppermint Patty and Marcie are still going strong, but Patty is now Tricia, the queen of the Mean Girls. Pigpen is a horndog germophobe named Matt, Schroeder is Beethoven, the artsy loner who's always made fun of, and Lucy? Well, she's in jail for exhibiting a little pyromania.

The play begins as everyone's favorite beagle has just died of rabies (we hear reports of poor Woodstock's rather graphic demise in said beagle's doghouse), and CB suddenly finds himself asking the bigger questions about the meaning of life, the meaning of love, and how it is we're all supposed to treat each other. Throw in a couple of lunch periods, a few conversations out in the schoolyard, some intense encounters in the music room, and a drunken party when Marcie's parents are away, and the whole powder-keg of high school life erupts, testing the kids' relationships and the ways they look at the world.

The cast was great. The actor playing CB was cute and very relatable. Each of us later said he reminded us of some guy friend we knew, so I guess that means he did a really good job playing the Everyman. Other standouts included firecrackers Sally and Lucy, and Beethoven, who had to carry most of the emotional weight of the play.

I'm not sure if this play was an authorized adaptation of Peanuts - but TheJohnson made the very astute observation that the play never once calls any of the characters by their comic strip names. They all either had new nicknames or were just simply known as "CB's Sister" or "Van's Sister." Whether they worked with the Schulz estate or not, I think the playwright did a great job staying true to those characters we all know and love.

Dog Sees God is running through August 13. If you're looking for something fun to do for a relatively good price ($25 tix), check it out!

The plan to go see this show arose out of my summer-doldrums commitment to finding some new intellectual stimulation in this fair city of ours. It's been too hot for me to check out the exhibitions I want to see (walking to a museum filled with tourists doesn't sound too appealing right now), but watch for more cultural reviews in the coming weeks.

----------------------------------------------------

Side note: Happy Hair Update
For those of you following my hair saga - I'm happy to report that it looks a lot better today. Mr. Stylist told me not to shampoo it all for the first 3 days so as to keep the red color strong. But, instead, I've shampooed it 5 times in these 3 days and - hooray!!! - the red is fading nicely. Today, I started to see some gold emerge in the highlights, and the overall color is toned down. CG told me the whole color looked much warmer today than it did earlier in the week. So buh-bye, neon red! Hello, coppery tones! :-)