How Not to Improve Your Looks

Are you a young person who wants to look older? Are you an adult wanting to look younger? Do you have any Dutch Boy Paint? Read on...

Many years ago, in another life it seems, I was in first grade. I had hardly a care in the world, except how to be taken seriously by grownups. My friends and I were always too young to go anywhere, or do anything that wasn't part of school or church. In fact when I visited my neighbor one morning, his mother was just leaving for some fancy, work-related lunch party. When my friend pressed her to take him along, she said those tank-stopping words to keep us at home:

"You're not old enough to go!"

This was a frequent ploy by grownups, used to drop the curtain of secrecy and keep us from discovering what fun, marvelous secret things went on in the world of adulthood. You want to drive a car? No way, you're too young. Jump off the tall diving board? Sorry, grownups only; you can't even be by the pool by yourselves. Drop the cat into a deep-fryer? Forget it, you're not even tall enough to see over the stove.

We were doomed to wait, and our teenage years would take forever to arrive. We were sick of being young. There had to be some better way. Fortunately, my friend stumbled on to a solution: house paint ! In the car-port there were two open cans of white Dutch Boy. We could use them to change the color of our hair to appear older and more distinguished! How brilliant!

The only question was, would two gallons be enough?
Answer: Just about.

Without accurate professional brushes we found the next best thing: dead branches! They were a yard long with the leaves still attached, and there were stirring-sticks left lying around. Perfect!

We started with each other's hair. It took some trial-and-error (lots of trial, but even lots more error), but we got the daubs of paint to resemble the unmistakable smears of maturity and age. We should have been older than our parents at that point. Not stopping there, we ended up with white paint on our eyebrows, ears, feet, back, arms and legs-- yes, I know we didn't have that much hair on our arms and legs, but we were discovering that thick Dutch Boy Paint had a mind of its own, and went where it felt like it, leafy branch or no. I looked like the head of Santa Clause on a three-foot-tall, Filipino body.

By the time we were done (read: told each other to cut it out) we were adorned not only by white hair, but were festooned with enough streaky white marks that we could also have gotten lost in a field of albino tigers. I couldn't wait to show this off at school.

But as expected, the older kids and parents found out before we each even got home. The elders were unhappy. We spent perhaps an hour under their "help", with kerosene used to wash off all our hard work. They said we looked ridiculous. I thought we succeeded in looking older quite convincingly, as long as you believed in a sixty-year-old, camouflaged midget attending the first grade.

But I knew the real reason we were in trouble: if other kids knew about this newly-discovered shortcut to becoming a grownup, children will not have to be under the control of their elders anymore! The secret had to be destroyed, and other parents informed so this does not happen again.

Some thirty years later, I'm looking in a mirror. I realize I am on the other side of the curtain. I can drive, dive, or deep-fry any time I want, without getting hassled. I've caught myself telling my own five-year-old that, no, he cannot cut his own hair, he's too young. Is being grown up as good as I thought it was? Maybe. If I ever want to see any white hair now, I'll first pause to laugh at six-year-old me and my friend, then look for some tweezers.

The television is blaring out an infomercial for cheaply getting rid of your wrinkles. The laptop is on a website promising to make your teeth white again. An open magazine on the table shows an ad for some ridiculous machine to firm up your mouth and facial muscles. And I find myself captivated by this ad for a brush-on product that somehow turns your aging hair black! What a concept. If they had only contacted us a mere thirty years ago, we would have been glad to sell them all the black hair we had. Assuming, of course, that we got our parents' permission.