Four siblings from everyone’s favorite fictional family of gingers: The Weasleys.
I am a part of the 1%.
Proudly.
I have red hair. Just like Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Brigham Young, Elizabeth I, Henry VIII, Calvin Coolidge, Vincent Van Gogh, Andrew Jackson, Axl Rose, Martin Van Buren, Tina Louise (her most famous character, of course, was Ginger!), Dwight Eisenhower, Ulysses S Grant, George Washington….
Well, I used to, anyway. My mother commented recently that my hair has more sawdust in it than she remembered. But it’s red. Honest.
In my heart, I am a ginger.
My senior picture, 1974, when the sawdust wasn’t flying so much.
I’m an award-winning red head, actually, as I won the contest for the baby with the reddest hair at the Graham Street Fair. How I ever beat out Kathy Linville, I’ll never know … maybe she won an award for some other cuteness. By the time we were in elementary school and our mothers belonged to the same club, we were mistaken for twins. Why? The hair. Believe me, it was only the hair.
Today, I read that red heads are known to react differently than other people to things other than the sun. Specifically, novocaine is known to not affect people with red hair as quickly as it affects the other unlucky 99% of the population.
Perhaps that explains the time that Mom took me to the dentist – I was probably 6 years old. Old-time dentist in Savannah, MO. How long ago was this? He had a water-cooled drill, but didn’t have a suction machine to take the water out of your mouth. Think about it.
In any event, the dentist gave me a shot and dove in … and when he started to drill, I grabbed his arm and yanked his hand out of my mouth. While the drill was working on my teeth that WERE NOT NUMB.
At the time, I blamed the dentist. I still do. But maybe, just maybe, he would have blamed my red hair.
Doesn’t matter. His hand did not belong in my mouth.
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Daily Kos: The Science Of Red Hair
