The Blues

Welcome to the retro alternative to Box-Set Blues – its non-waxed sister:  Big-Hair Bazooka. Stories from the 80s will be fired at will – much like the action of the large gunned name – and no topic will be sacred.

Come with Veronica Lord as she and her friends take you down the yellow-brick road of hair mousse discovery, purchasing red leg warmers and matching beret, queuing for Culture Club tickets, accepting shop-lifted diamante earrings, engaging in a first pash-fest (snog, kiss, mouth-o-course) and generally being teenaged brain beneath the hugest hair possible.

Veronica Lord turned thirteen in the Australian summer of 1980.  Despite her name, she never went on to become a porn star or an undercover agent for Trixie Beldon Spies Inc.  She turned out normal (ish).  It is attested her brain was chemically affected by the gallons of hair product she applied between the years of 1980 and 1990, when she turned 23 and decided to adopt the stringent hard-hair of the nineties.

Enter hair wax – the stuff you apply to your hair, as well as the stuff spooned lovingly upon the lower regions, prior to it being ripped off in shards.

But back then, mousse was Veronica’s big-hair bazooka of choice.  She loved it.  If she could have made a shrine to Wella™ hair mousse in its shiny pink long cylinder – with pointy nozzle – she would have.  In fact, Veronica established a small hair mousse ‘scoreboard’ in her bedroom, just below the poster of Robert Smith from The Cure.

But that was later in the 80s, when Ms Lord had gained a bit more street cred by applying hair product to her steel wool hair.  Let’s do a Maria Von Trapp and ‘start at the very beginning…’

Veronica Lord doesn’t work that way!  She wants to take you to the February, just after her sixteenth birthday.  Her mother had been shopping, Veronica had arrived home from school (the Catholic college twenty minutes bus ride away, known as St Vatican Isrich) to find an item of clothing had been purchased  just for her.

It was a full length, lipstick pink (to match the mousse bottle?) JUMPSUIT.

Veronica Lord was an ungrateful wench in those days.  Her mother didn’t approve of her applying a bottle of hair mousse a day to a boof that would be much nicer as ‘soft, natural curls’ and Veronica didn’t approve of her mother trying to define her style. It was inevitable mother-daughter angst, 80s version.

It’s an angst that has to happen, The Mother-Daughter face!off.  Unfortunately, the JUMPSUIT from LIPSTICK PINK Hell was trapped in the hard, tightly coiled curls of Veronica Lord’s teenage tanty.  She didn’t like this jumpsuit!  She said so, and her mother – the wonderful, supportive O’meh Lord (she’s of Irish descent, this mum) – was immediately peeved.

‘Oh, Veronica!’ she exclaimed.  ’It’s lovely. It’s all the rage.  It will look beautiful with the white, heeled court shoe I brought you to wear with your white linen pants at Christmas.’

‘It’s pink!  I hate pink!’

O’meh sighed.  She had five daughters, but Veronica might as well have been born ‘the other way’.  She was so . . . butch! ‘Try it on, love.  You might like it.’

In reality, O’meh Lord was a feisty woman.  She would never have said that, but would have grabbed the garment, slapped Veronica’s face and gone off to spring clean the entire house (in Autumn). She would have given the pink jumpsuit to someone more deserving.  Someone less . . . butch.

Veronica Lord was not a pouter.  She didn’t stew on her bad moods for days at a time.  Rather, she adapted the big-haired approach – was there, in your face, angry . . . then flopped.  She stormed down to the mirror inside her wardrobe door, turned up Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler and applied the jumpsuit carefully over her heavily moussed head.

It looked d’vine – or, as Veronica said in 1983, ace. Suddenly, she looked trendy*  (Planet Retro word for hot, in vogue, fabulous)

Apparently, Veronica Lord owns that pink jumpsuit still.  It has a white cord round the high-waisted middle.  It has a zipper from crotch to collar.  It is modest, but so zesty, it almost jumps from her cupboard and dances to the memory of parties and nightclubs and the time she went on a date to a fashionable city eatery.

And if it could speak to you, it would tell you of the night Veronica Lord wore it with a matching Olivia Newton-John (‘Let’s Get) Physical’ headband and a chunky Madonna (silver, massive) cross and chain.

But, the jumpsuit never tells.  Its lips?  They’re zipped.

[ad#long for post]

Random Reads

• August 20, 2009 -- What next? A Blog, Facebook and Twitter, FFS?
• June 25, 2010 -- Winter Down Under
• February 20, 2011 -- Cold Reading Series
• December 15, 2009 -- Checking For (firm-buttocked) Dangers
• February 3, 2011 -- Gen, Y?