Karma Chameleon
(O'Dowd, G/ Moss, J/ Craig, M/ Hay, R/ Pickett, P) Performed by Culture Club
There's a loving in your eyes all the way
If I listen to your lies would you say
I'm a man without conviction
I'm a man who doesn't know
How to sell a contradiction?
You come and go, you come and go
Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon
You come and go, you come and go
Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams
Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green
Didn't you hear your wicked words ever'y day
And you used to be so sweet
I heard you say
That my love was an addiction
When we cling, our love is strong
When you go, you're gone forever
You string along, you string along
Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon
You come and go, you come and go
Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams
Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green
Ev'ry day is like survival
You're my lover, not my rival
Ev'ry day is like survival
You're my lover, not my rival
I'm a man without conviction
I'm a man who doesn't know
How to sell a contradiction
You come and go, you come and go
Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon
You come and go, you come and go
Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams
Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green
Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon
You come and go, you come and go
Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams
Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green
Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon
You come and go, you come and go
Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams
Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green
Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon
You come and go, you come and go
Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams
Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green
I remember mentioning to some boyfriend in high school that I wished I was as pretty as Boy George. I remember the scoffing (without remembering quite which boy it was who scoffed) and I recall there being a tinge of homophobia to his reaction -- and what's curiouser is that, in my innocence, I never really thought of Boy George as gay; had never heard of drag queens or cross-dressers (beyond British comedy, I suppose), and I totally accepted Boy George's look as just a show business thing. When I said I wished I was that pretty, what I really meant was, "I wish I knew how to do my makeup like that", because like all teenage girls, I just didn't know what my look should be or how to achieve it.
From my earliest memories, people had always made a fuss over my hair: its unique colour (Mum remembers some woman saying to her when I was little, "Her hair is such a beautiful red -- not like yours of course -- but really beautiful"; Mum always emphasised the backhanded insult to her in that statement) and its natural curl (Mum says that when I was little, she only needed to wrap strands around her fingers to form ringlets). And yet, growing up, I never knew what to do with my hair either; straightening out the curls was my number one goal. Being a teenager in the 80s truly meant that anything goes, but living in such a conservative community, that didn't mean that I could go full Boy George. So for years, fitting in and looking like everyone else took a lot of my energy.
For pretty much all of my Lethbridge high school years, I would shower every morning, return to my room, crank up my cassette player and belt out my favourite songs (and for months, that was my Culture Club tape; I stopped when I heard my mother singing Karma Chameleon in the kitchen) as I blow dried and curled my hair. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but in order to straighten my hair every day, I needed to curl my bangs forward and the rest of my crown in a series of rolls to the back so that I could then brush it all back into a feathered shag. When my girls look at pictures of me from high school they insist this is a "Lady Mullet", but it was much more Markie Post in Night Court than Charlise Theron in Monster: I was conservative but cute. As for my makeup, I never learned anything beyond three shades of eyeshadow (medium on the lid, ultralight under the brow, dark in the crease; still my go-to dress-up look) with plenty of black eyeliner and mascara. My lips are so thin that lipstick seems to highlight that fact, and as a result, I've always avoided it; I never even went through the bubblegum lipgloss phase. Again, I looked like everyone else.
All my friends lived in blue jeans and conservative tops, and really, that's all you could buy in Lethbridge. I do remember a couple of shopping trips to Calgary and picking up things that pushed that envelope a bit: I remember some jeans I bought that had cargo pockets down the legs and what looked like splashes of white paint all over them; I also picked up a pair of skin tight jeans that were plain denim on the back (with no rear pockets) and a denim leopard print on the front -- these jeans caused raised eyebrows even from my friends. I remember Kasia and I buying some similar pants in grade eleven -- hers had fuchsia and navy alternating pinstripes and mine were turquoise and navy -- and although they were too big for us when we bought them, we brought them back to her house and took in the side seams to make them painted-on tight (and we both made them so narrow that we couldn't get our feet through the ends of them and had to rip that bit out). Kasia called these our "Marilyn Monroe" pants (I still don't get the reference) and I remember wearing mine once with this belt my mother had: the belt was made of black braided leather and could go around a waist three times, but I had looped it around once loosely and let it drape down a second loop (I felt like a gunslinger when I left the house), but when I got to school and had a couple of guys (rough guys that I wouldn't normally talk to) compliment me on the "whips and chains" look, I demurred from ever trying that again.
Meanwhile, Cyndi Lauper and Madonna were making fashion statements with big hair and accessories, and when these kinds of things started being sold in Lethbridge, I pretty much left my pack and bought anything that caught my eye: lace gloves; dangly earrings; strings of fake pearls to wear as bracelets; anything neon; anything military. I used to love wearing a long man's dress shirt and pin the tips of the collar together with a reproduction war medal on a ribbon. I'd wear long shirts or long cardigans over stirrup pants with several long strands of beads and I was ridiculously happy the time I found a pair of tights that looked just like men's longjohns. I don't remember now if I was reacting to the distance that was growing between me and my best friends or if my nonconformist clothing contributed to that distance, but the stranger my clothes got, the more I was simply on my own. I remember once I was in the school library and Mirella -- who had been mad at me and hadn't talked to me in weeks -- came over just to point and laugh at the clothes I was wearing and that broke the ice between us and made us friends again; I remember her pointing at my yellow neon tie, black T-shirt, turquoise pants, yellow neon socks, and bright pink terrycloth tennis shoes (I probably wouldn't remember that particular combo if I couldn't right now totally recall Mirella pointing at each item individually and cackling). Meanwhile, my hair and makeup never changed throughout high school; I never had the nerve to make that Boy George leap.
When I went to university, however, and met new friends, I had a new tribe to conform to; and that conformity involved a lot of hair spray. This is when I started buying all my clothes from the Sally Ann: my favourite outfits were bejewelled polyester dresses with matching jackets from the sixties and my houndstooth trench coat (I chose not to go black trench like everyone else; my Dad hated this oversized old man's coat). This is also when I gave up my curling iron and got an asymmetrical fauxhawk, using hair spray to make the top stand up. I eventually buzzed down the other side, too, and dyed one side of the stubble a bright pink: it took me until my second year of university to find a way to express what I felt inside -- I hadn't exactly been a chameleon for all of these years, but it wasn't until I was genuinely expressing myself that I saw how I had been repressing myself; blending in and laying low.
But then...I met a boy that I lost my mind over, and although at first he said that it was my unique look that had attracted him, his jealousy and possessiveness -- Whose attention are you trying to get with all that? -- put me right back into a little box; I gave up the hair and the clothes, and eventually, the boy. And by then, my moment had passed.
It was when I moved up to Edmonton that I discovered what I should have known my whole life: if I just put a bit of mousse or gel in my hair when I get out of the shower and rough it up a bit, my hair will form curls all on their own that need no further help from me. Over the years, I've tried many times to find a more polished look, and I've had many haircuts that have made me cry, but in the end, it always grows out into the same general shape that is simply good enough for me. Okay, I know all this sounds like I'm obsessed with my own hair, but honestly, I don't think about it until some stranger mentions it. All through my life, there have always been those guys who would call out, "Hey Red" from passing cars and those women with fine, straight hair who tell me they're jealous (and when they invariably add, "But I bet when you were growing up you wished you had hair like mine", I always lie and say yes; I may have been trying to straighten it, but I did recognise that my hair only took to the curling iron because of its texture; fine and straight wouldn't have held my signature shag).
I remember volunteering in a beer tent in Edmonton for the Fringe Festival one year and a slightly soused older woman came in, took one look at me, and said aggressively, "I suppose you're going to tell me that's natural curl?" I was taken aback, but agreed that it was, and she said, "Mmm hmm. And the colour, too? Oh yes, it's to dye for." I could only laugh and let it go, but I've always remembered that woman's belligerence at just the sight of my hair. I remember one night at the bar I worked at, it was after last call and the lights came up, and a semi-regular customer looked at me and said, "Oh my God. How long has your hair been red?" I assured him it always had been and he sat looking at me in amazement, saying that in the dim lights he had always assumed it was brunette. I couldn't fathom why it made a difference, but I began to wonder if all of my regulars knew my hair was red or if I was somehow "passing for normal" (and then one night some time after this, an older, drunken guy I had never seen before said, "Hey, tell me, do the carpets match the drapes?" I had never heard that expression before, but I twigged its meaning right away and walked off in a huff, but certainly confused about how one drunk could see my hair colour but another couldn't).
Twenty years of being a stay-at-home mother has made it easy for me to neglect my look; to just grow out my hair and wear comfy clothes. Now that I'm back at work, however, I wonder if I should put in more effort. I got my hair cut a couple of weeks ago (first time since Christmas 2014), and even this new stylist asked me if my curl is natural; if the colour is, too. She then asked if I have ever considered getting some blonde highlights put in, and while I know that the red hair with blonde streaks was kind of a trendy look ten or fifteen years ago, I was too indifferent to trends at the time to get them then and worry about trying too hard to look younger than I am right now. The stylist explained that the blonde highlights would probably blend out my, "well...greying areas", and that made me smile: I've had the stray white hair since I was a teenager, and the more of them I get, the more happy I am; I have long looked forward to going full witchy once the red is all gone and I can tease out the white curls. In the end, the stylist just gave me a trim -- same general shape I've had for yonks -- and while I can honestly say that I'm comfortable in my own skin today, moreso than at any other time in my life, I'm still thinking about those highlights; maybe it's never too late to awaken the chameleon within and display a little flash.
Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon
You come and go, you come and go
Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams
Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green
