toro blondes

I've been picking up hosting shifts at Toro, while their usual girl is in Spain for a month.

My roommate Michael called me a traitor and an industry whore for doing this. I say, whatev--a girl's gotta make a buck. And since Toro is paying me almost as much by the hour as I make as a lowly publishing peon, how could I say no? Besides, working the door at one of Boston's hottest new restaurants, owned by one of Boston's most highly acclaimed chefs, is sure to give me lots of material for my little blonde vs. the world experiment. I've sat many, many blonde women, in the two shifts I've worked thus far. Last night, however, I sat this ethereal blonde woman who made me rethink my entire experiment: she made me think that I need to be striving to take my blonde-ness to greater heights.

Her hair was definitely a 12. It was so platinum, so light in fact that it seemed to glow. It looked almost white, like an ethereal (but not exactly angelic) halo around her head.

She was definitely a full process kind of girl.

She looked at once totally innocent and vampishly sexy. Her skin was tan, and her blue eyes popped with bedroom intensity. Standing next to her, with my level 10 color, in the same outfit I'd picked out to wear to my day job, where I hardly care how I look, I felt utterly dowdy.

As I felt that I'm-so-ugly-standing-next-to-the-prettiest-girl-in-the-room feeling seep into the pit of my stomach like spilled ink, I looked closely, carefully at her outfit, her body, did a part by part comparison of what this blonde had to offer that I didn't. (This is research, mind you--not sheer cattiness. Right.)

It must be the outfit, I thought. She's out on a date and I'm still wearing the same thing I threw on for work at 6am, over 13 hours ago. She's dressed up, and I'm just freaking tired--I bet she would be too if she had to work 2, sometimes 3 jobs. But the dress she wore was just a simple shirt-dress, black, short sleeved, well cut, but nothing to write home about. I think I even sat another girl wearing the exact same dress on the patio just a few hours earlier.

Well, the shoes must have something to do with it, I thought next. I'm wearing flats, and she's wearing heels. Heels increase your sexiness quotient by like 50%. But hers were low heels, 1 1/2-2 inches, and her shoes weren't particularly sexy. That wasn't it either.

I looked closely at her face, which was pretty: cute, ski-jump nose, square jaw, big eyes, pretty mouth. But pretty is all I saw, Kate Hudson or Reese Witherspoon style pretty. Not Angelina Jolie striking, or Gisele exotic, or anything more than pretty.

All of these parts on their own seemed so average, yet there was something about her that was absolutely striking.

Then I realized: It's the hair.

I have to talk to Jason, I thought. What is she doing that I haven't been doing? For this experiment to work, for the project to come to fruition at all, I need to be more like her.

Full process, here I come.