ASHLEY MAURITZEN
Stumbling into my local newsagent this morning, I saw the headline ‘Fawcett Dead’ and thought that the day couldn’t get any shittier. Well, that is what should have happened. As it was, the woman who inspired 45% of 1978 Klu Klux Klan Convention attendees to name red swimsuits their favourite beach accessory was mysteriously absent from the front pages. Someone else was there. All of you know what I’m talking about. For me though, it was the lack of Cap’n Crunch that got the award for first official Friday tragedy with Farrah coming in a close second. Apparently death, like life, just isn’t fair.
Farrah Fawcett was a lot more than an iconic hairstyle and the creator of a hole in the ozone layer 3,642,078 times the size of her face. Hold it - what am I saying? She WAS just an iconic hairstyle and who’s got a problem with that? Huh? It worked for Abraham Lincoln, Billy Ray Cyrus and the woman on the L’Oreal Elnett hairspray bottle. In fact, the only place it doesn’t seem to be working is for a white blues group called The Kind of Long Haired Band. Serves them right for trying to get clever with it.
I never had the honour of being in a room with Farrah Fawcett’s hair but I know that, if I had, it would have been a bit like being at a party where the family pet was in the final throes of a terminal disease; no one would have been able to think about anything else. In my dreams I’ve touched it and thin strands have lingered on my fingers like the candyfloss flavoured linguine that angels eat. Some say that Farrah spent the last few years of her life weaving discarded hairs together to create a golden chrysalis/coffin from which she might one day rise again. Others talk about an ‘extra authentic’ life size fuck doll. Me, I’m just happy with the strands I managed to fish out her bin and shove down my pants before the security guard started shooting at me from the sauna window of her LA mansion last summer.