Okay, to be perfectly frank and quite precise, I was only blonde for four hours and thirteen minutes…I woke up this morning and knew I could go through with it. …I felt it in the air. This would be the day. My guts mocked me. All logic laughed behind my back; it was like I had temporarily lost my mind. But the stakes were low and they were all follicles. And shades of color, points along the ROYGBIV scale. It wasn’t a matter of survival. It was simply something I owed myself. A long overdue promise broken, a rite of passage, post-dated, too many times forgotten, overlooked, excused, pre-empted, ignored.

And this was the perfect day for a fortysomething brunette with deep Mediterranean roots (you’ll ignore the pun) to stir the brew (or sit on a plastic swivel chair, while it was being stirred)…it was Halloween. You wear a disguise, you let go of sanity in the name of exploration, silliness, drama or something traditionally regarded as a “holiday” in which you trade in or on your looks on October 31st and you are totally, paradoxically sane.

In Bernard’s hands, I would be safe. He cut with precision, colored many heads with lavishly beautiful results. And to be fair, he pointed at my very dark eyebrows with his comb, repeating the words below.

“You’re sure?”

I’d nodded.

“You’re sure you’re sure?”

More nods, bravely, from me.

“You’re sure you’re sure because we don’t have to…”

“No. Let’s roll.”

“That was so, un-you, you know? That’s how I know you’re not sure,” he offered as a last plaintive plea.

“It’s a new me. You change.”

“Some people change. Some people should stay within a target range.”

I tried my one of my favorite maxims.

“The truth is a moving target, Bernie.”

And when the towel, almost an hour later, came off, Bernie and I tried to speak. But gutteral sounds, and tiny ones, were the only noises we could each pull off. Or get out.

“So.” That was Bernie’s assessment of me, and his work.

Becky, his perky assistant and trainee, was dead-on. “It’s like Goth, in reverse.”

I spoke, finally. “Exactly. Dead-on, Becky. I couldn’t find a better….way…to describe it.”

I never thought I’d love it or stick with it. The way I slip on my mother’s mink – for seconds at a time, all honest liberal animal-loving betrayal – and admit that it is acceptable to embrace deep, faux-minks for that intensity of deep hazelnut coffee brew, against warm-toned skin – in my case, red-lipsticked, or pink-lipped Semitic and brown- eyed – and how it made you glamorous. I expected something blonde and fabulous. But I looked freakish and I frightened my neighbor’s children.

You probably don’t have to wait for Halloween to color your hair. You owe it to yourself, especially if you think you do. But I am a candidate for blonde the way I could play for the Knicks, all of me, on a good day, in Jimmy Choo’s, maybe five ft. seven.

I gave my scalp – and my psyche – and Bernie’s crowded calendar almost four and a half hours to breathe. And after a little under five and a half hours, I was not the “How-would-I-look-if” girl, the one who had peered at another language for beauty, another emblem that was more than a hair color but an identity, and knew I might someday be grey, silver or some awful mousy combo platter (I doubted I would luck out with some elegant “Mrs. Robinson” stripe) but gladly, gloriously, lavishly brunette, and eternally, the Anti-Blonde. I didn’t even need to rifle through the kids’ Halloween candy. I had been blonde for a day and come back to the other side.

But there was something else. Like a boy growing into a man’s shoes, finally, finally, there was another layer to knowing who I was and a deep, profound comfort in the color of my hair, another comfort in being who I was…and understanding – with much satisfaction—that I loved my inner brunette.