Gray is the New Blond

Have I got some great news! Gray is the new blond!
This epiphany came to me when that cute Jimmy-B from high school took note of a Facebook pix of me from the era.
I was a blond.
My daughters were shocked. Which made it a double-wonderful photo posting.
Blondes had more fun back then. This is, of course, news to my daughters who never heard the Clairol ad playing within the Musak of our formative years.
My youngest shrugs off the time differential and assures me she gets the jokes of the Sixties. "Remember," she flapped her hand at me, "I'm a history major."
I want to point out to her, a blond herself, that the girls of my generation with a Clairol connection led the way to the burned out brain cells that ultimately fostered her generation's blond jokes. Now that's history.
But I don't bother. Now that I realize gray is the new blond, I toss back a word of her own, "pssshaw."
This is even better than when brown became the new black -- an intelligent move taken as the Baby Boomer Bulge hit the age where black turned many of us sallow. And seems everyone has learned to work their photo-phone these days. Browns, of course, provide a wider range of opportunities to spruce up a paler palette.

Of course, I am gender specific here. Because, naturally, just like with Mz Clairol, none of this matters with men.

That's one of those failures I think we Baby Boomers have to accept. We have jealously kept much of our gender-stuff entrenched in WWII roles. This is different with the Boomlets. Just take a look around.
For a while it was nice to think Boomer mothering eased gender distinctions and barriers. But when my daughters reached puberty my mother's words spewed from my mouth. Nothing was different. It still was, after all, girls who carried the babies.

So now I think it is because of the hormones in grocery store chickens. It's what my friend Carolyn has always said. A Boomer. Blond Boomer.

And for Boomers, men will always be boys. And even this most spectacular of recent Baby-Boomer shifts -- making the Seventies the new Fifties -- isn't really going to help. As I see it, the guys just get twenty more years to play Peter Pan.
What do you bet they still picture Wendy as a blond.