on boots, blondes and paper mills

I have a new pair of Baffin winter boots, and I think they are the best invention since Joseph's flax flat bread. When I walked to the train this morning, amidst snow and slippery unshoveled sidewalks, I had no fear of falling. My footsteps might have technically been heavy (they are large boots, after all), but I felt like I was treading very lightly indeed. And that is my product plug for the day. Perhaps they were made lighter by the fact that they were gifted to me, and my bank account did not have to suffer to surround my feet with cushiony warmth.

Do you know what I am not plugging? Being blonde. I committed to change my hair color for my current show long before I realized that I didn't really respect the integrity of this theatre company enough to make such a drastic change. A committment, however, is a committment. And so I find myself sitting at my work desk an altered being. A blonde being. And since making the change, I have only been at work, at rehearsal, or in transit between the two locations--and therefore do not think blondes actually have more fun. They do, however, have need for more conditioner.

I am going out on Friday (my one night off from the show in many moons), and hopefully being blonde will be a pleasing experience for the first time since I shelled out the megabucks to be somebody I'm not. Do not get me wrong--the hair looks fine. It looks natural-esque (I have blue eyes and was blonde as a child), but it's just such a significant alteration that I feel like I'm wearing a wig all the time. Mayhaps sometime I will get used to it--just in time to go back to my natural somewhere between brown and dark blonde with hints 'o red color.

I feel kind of petty complaining about my hair and this trainwreck of a show when the economy is nosediving and the news is a series of depressing events. I read the online version of my local paper (the Lewiston Sun Journal out of Maine--I am 45 minutes from Lewiston, but that is still the "local" paper), and this morning there was a headline announcing that NewPage Corp, the owners of the paper mill in the neighboring town of Rumford, is laying off 16% of their employees--both salaried and hourly. That mill quite literally employs the majority of my small town's population. In our town, people either work for the mill, are teachers for the children of the people who work in the mill, or are lumberjacks--cutting down trees destined eventually to go to the mill. Or they're retired. My family is not directly affected by this--my father is superintendent of a nearby school district and my mother is currently unemployed due to her health, but I know that this sort of thing is going to be catastrophic for our humble community. A community that, by the way, probably has a lower household income than is average for the state, even before layoffs.

I'm ashamed to admit that I always sort of romanticized The Great Depression. After all, the leaner times seemed to inspire sort of uprising of community spirit and family closeness and moral strength. But my impression of a sort of warm and fuzzy community brought together by poverty was completely gleaned from novels and films and musicals. Even "The Grapes of Wrath," one of my all time favorites, made me imagine that people were more resilient and family-oriented because of their financial suffering (despite the all together bleak circumstances in the novel).

Instead, I think the fear of economic collapse is making people surround themselves with a protective shell--hardening individuals instead of softening them and melding them with others in similar situations.

I'm just glad I can pray. Oxford County, Maine--you're ranking pretty high on my list of shout outs to God these days.