Heads Up

I'm wandering through a party store yesterday alone, up and down the aisles. Somewhere in the store is Daughter and her best friend. They've ditched me in a mad rush to cover more ground. I'm a slow-moving adult.

I gave them two choices of where we could go to buy a few cheap trinkets for them to play with. There was the dollar store or the party store. They chose the party store because of all the dress up stuff, and the wonderful opportunity to make fun of me - there's a gigantic 50th birthday aisle filled with geriatric devices that they pull out to humiliate me in advance of my 50th birthday in March. I especially like the bra with pulleys and springs. Little do they know I've needed that one for years.

But I'm alone when I discover the treasure trove that we end up buying. I schlep back to the front of the store to get a cart it's so perfect, so wonderful, that I need many of them. What is it? Styrofoam wig heads. Fifty cents each.

What can I do with a styrofoam head? What can't I do? The girls can paint them. I can mosaic them. Bar Mitzvahzilla can bring them to his friend's house and shoot them with air soft guns (though I'm only willing to sacrifice one to this waste). As a woman with, at best, half a head in working order at any time, I know I need some support. I need these heads.

But first we have to get them to the cashier and then out of the store. We put fourteen in the shopping cart. It kind of looks a little weird, I'm aware of that - bodyless, chopped off heads, all pale and staring. It's a little gory, unusual for me since I have a low scare threshold. But for art, for the dream of art, for a three-dimensional canvas? For that I'll load up a pile of heads.

I carry four heads at a time into the house, one under each arm, one in each hand. A head drops and rolls in the garage. I think of the movie Rear Window and look surreptitiously at my neighbors' houses to see if anyone's watching me. I pick up the head and get inside.

Later I'm driving Daughter and her friend to the friend's house where they'll spend the evening. They're both going to paint their heads to resemble the boys they have crushes on. Suddenly they both get really quiet. I look in the backseat and catch them kissing the styrofoam lips.

Okay, then. I guess they can be used for that too.
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Thank you to Kristin over at Motherese for awarding me the Happy 101 blogger award, my first ever! This post encompasses many of the things that makes me happy: my daughter, her best friend, whom she's known since the baby room at her preschool, art, the dream of art, my son and how he'll always turn things on their head because of, well, testosterone.

I pass the award on to a blogger who, though I've just found her, never fails to bring a smile to my face: Charlotte of Memories for Later. Thanks, Charlotte for your humor-filled posts and for reminding me that just because our particulars are different, we are very much the same inside.

Please click on this link to donate to the Save the Children Fund for Haiti, or you may donate to the Red Cross through this link. This blog is part of the Help Haiti blog challenge and will be donating $2 for each blog comment entered from 1-15-10 through 1-20-10, including my own responses.