Pilot's Varsity Disposable Fountain-Pens

Since 2006, I’ve dyed at least part of my hair pink, usually a few locks near my face. The dye comes in a kit from L’oreal and doesn’t require bleaching beforehand ““ brush it on, wait thirty minutes, and wash it off. Voila, cartoon-bright streaks among the (once-prematurely) graying strands.

The first time I dyed it, I was about to head off to my first Wiscon ““ a large feminist science fiction convention held yearly in Madison, Wisconsin. As I’ve found the case at sf conventions since then, I wasn’t the only person there with an odd hair color; I glimpsed rainbows of pink, blue, and green. And I realized it was becoming. Complete strangers would lean over and whisper, “I like your hair,” including two flight attendants on the way home.

After the con the color faded, softer and softer, until finally, when I went to get a haircut, the hairdresser was cutting away dusty rose tips. I looked in the mirror and saw a middle-aged woman with a short, practical cut.

I bought a new kit on the way home and re-pinked my hair that afternoon.

Since then it’s become a ritual following each haircut. I go in and see it trimmed away until only the faintest hint of color remains. Sometimes I take advantage of this time to do my shopping in sedater department stores like Macy’s or Nordstroms, excursions that I think of as “passing for surburban.” Then I go home and re-dye my hair. I’m always a little self-conscious those first few days of screaming fuchsia, when I have to sleep with a towel over the pillow to keep the pink from leaving traces on the pillowcase. I try to time these days to coincide with a science fiction convention or some similar event.

I use that as an excuse when people ask me why I dye it. “I’m a sci-fi writer and it helps fans identify me at cons,” I say. That’s the partial truth. It’s part of my brand. But it’s also more than that.

Sometimes people interpret it for me. When my mother was recovering from surgery for colon cancer one year, I visited the hospital every day and used the valet parking they provided. “I know why your hair’s pink,” the elderly valet confided to me one day as he took the keys from me. “Are you a survivor or is it a relative?” I realized that he thought I was part of the flood of pink that month against cancer. I couldn’t bear to disillusion him, so I said something to him about my mother, and he went on to tell me about the women in his life who had struggled with cancer.

That’s another reason why I dye it pink. People talk to me. There’s something about the color that draws them to ask about it or say that they like it. The only person I’ve ever found who disapproved outright was a relative’s girlfriend. She didn’t last. My hair color has.

But more than that, the pink forces me to talk to people as well. I’ve habitually toed the line between introvert and extrovert, depending on which Meyer Briggs results you look at, and I like the fact that the pink pushes me outside myself, makes me be socially brave in a way I’ve sometimes retreated from.

The pink’s a favorite with people. I tried purple one year, a vibrant, almost fluorescent purple that required bleaching the hair beforehand, a painful process I will never repeat. Some nuance of the purple made it seem more confrontational, less welcoming than the pink. Fewer people came up to say something about it, although I was startled at one point when a man behind me began stroking it. “I couldn’t resist the color,” he said.

I have been advised to avoid blue. “It ages one,” a friend said, although I’ve admired the turquoise shading of Camille Alexa, a fellow speculative fiction writer, at several cons.

I worry that L’oreal will stop making this particular brand. I’ve got five boxes of it stockpiled under my sink. I figure I’ll commit to the color until the year or two that the boxes represent are past. After all, who knows what advances in hair color may have been made by then?

It took a while for my mother to get used to it. Finally one day, when we were coming out of a store, she chuckled. “Did you see that man?” she said. “He smiled at your hair. I guess anything that makes people smile is okay.”

And I agree. If I’m making people smile, I’m doing something right.

I’m lucky to live in Seattle, where hair is often not its natural shade. I’ve found when I visit the East Coast, particularly in the southern areas, people are not quite as welcoming of the color. They’re more likely to surreptitiously (or so they think) point it out to each other. I haven’t traveled abroad with it yet.

And I’m lucky to work at home as a writer, with no boss to object to the pink. More than once someone has wistfully said, “They would never let me do that at work.” That seems a shame to me, much like seeing the trainers at my gym wearing work-mandated band-aids over tattoos lest they shock the sensibilities of the patrons.

The hair color also lets people spot me in a society where being a middle-aged woman is often a cloak of invisibility. Sometimes that’s unwelcome. I’d rather fade into the crowd, which is much harder to do when pink-topped. That’s why I love sf conventions so much, why they feel like coming home to my spiritual tribe. At Penguicon I rubbed elbows with a woman whose wheelchair was tricked out like a Victorian mechanical contraption, complete with sporadic puffs of steam, a strapping young gentleman costumed as Thor, and a woman whose baby was dressed up as a miniature robot, complete with blinking lights. Indeed, at Norwescon, a local convention that’s particularly costume heavy, I look positively sedate.

It’s strange that I engage in this particular cosmetic practice. I’ve always resisted make-up. I put it on and, despite the best teachings of my mother the former Mary Kay representative, I see a clown-faced stranger in the mirror. The pink hair allows me to feel like I’ve managed some effort to dress up. Combine it with the right shirt, and people assume I’ve carefully color-coordinated outfit and hair.

But I cringe, just a faint recoil, when I look at those shirts in my closet: the crisp peppermint striped or hibiscus and butterfly printed shirts gleaned from the local Talbots outlet. Because here’s a secret: I’m not particularly fond of pink. I was never a Barbie girl. I like deep purples, turquoise, and emeralds.

In fact, I resent the way pink’s been mandated for little girls. I worry that I’m doing this to make myself less threatening to men, that I’m saying, “Look! I’m a feminist, but a fluffy pink harmless one.”

But I tell myself to stop over-thinking it. It’s a color, not a lifestyle. I embrace my pink and claim it. Which adds another dimension to it for me: it’s ironic statement as well as fashion one. It says I don’t give a damn about what other people consider age-appropriate. “This is me,” my hair says. And I look damn good in pink, or so I think.

Or maybe that’s just ego talking, an overly healthy one bolstered by all those strangers telling me they like my hair.

There are so many of us who write, and so many voices that get drowned out. I want to tell you about one of them. I want to tell you about my friend K.C. Ball.

She wrote short stories as well as novels, and I edited her collection, Snapshots from a Black Hole. She was talented and terrific at including emotion, while at the same time she was capable of spinning out a shaggy dog story to groaningly effective length.

K.C. was always conscious of time nipping at her heels, particularly after a heart attack where her wife Rachael (literally) saved her life with CPR. At the same time, she was a private and introverted person, not well-suited to the sort of buy-my-book shilling that’s sometimes necessary to be heard over the crowd. She kept hoping for more support from the networks she saw supporting other people, particularly some of the young white males whose work was appearing at the same time that she first started getting published. I met with her a couple of times to go over stories, but as time passed, she seemed more and more discouraged, feeling as though she was flinging work out into the void and not hearing much back.

She was trans, and older than me by a couple decades, and sometimes seemed bemused by the times we live in. I kept urging her to submit her stuff to places like the Lambda Awards, but she was reluctant. “Those aren’t for me,” she said, and I left it at that, albeit reluctantly. She could be a little cranky, a little morose and pessimistic, and sometimes I’d tease her into a better mood, and sometimes I’d let her be. She’d worked as a prison guard, and sometimes her outlook on the world was as cynically informed by that as you’d expect, but her stories were full of heroes and people living up the idea of being better. She loved superheroes.

I ran into her two years back at the grocery store, on Christmas Day, and she seemed pleased that I ran over to greet her. Now I’m regretting not being better about keeping in touch after she fell away from the writing group we shared, despite the fact that we were living so much closer to each other now that I’ve moved to West Seattle.

And now she’s gone, fallen to another heart attack, and she never really got the chance to “break out” the way many writers do, which is through hard work, and soldiering on through rejection, and most of all playing the long game. If you want to read some of her kick-ass work, here’s the collection I edited, Snapshots from a Black Hole and Other Oddities.

I’m so sorry not to able to hear your voice any more, K.C. I hope your journey continues on, and that it’s as marvelous as you were.