Vive la France

The 1978 film version of Les Miserables, starring Richard Jordan, is one of my favorite movies.  I have always loved movies that tell stories about life in dreadful times such as this and those set in Victorian England, like adaptations of Charles Dickens novels.  A pivotal point in Les Miserables, is when Jean Valjean is confronted by a poor French prostitute who has a small child that she cannot provide for because she was fired from her job for being an unwed mother and she blames him for those workplace policies being that he is Mayor of the town. The role is played by actress Angela Pleasence, and she looks rough, as she had to sell her hair and sell her body and take her chances with men who thought nothing of beating her for having no worth except to be abused in their view. I remember being so struck by the way that she looked when I first saw this film. It looked as real to me as you can get, especially later in the film when she is also ill, and I wondered how Angela Pleasence felt about how she looked when she got a load of herself in the mirror in full makeup and costume.  Remember this.  I will come back to it later.

This post is my second entry back in to writing after a period of about two and a half years of posting absolutely nothing.  I have had about seven years of very troubling times starting with the diagnosis of my mother having Dementia. It has been mostly downhill for me since then and learning to live in a very different world altogether once the pandemic hit in 2020 exacerbated everything. Though I have managed to keep myself sane during all of these troubles I have not come out completely unscathed in other ways.

I usually always have a pre-catastrophe dream before something in my life that is going to be a big issue for me hits.  I had a dream about two years ago where I looked up at the sky and saw the clouds open up to reveal the angry looking face of Neil deGrasse Tyson staring harshly down at me and yelling that if I didn’t stop drinking Coke I was going to die. That sounds hilarious on the surface, I know, but I knew exactly what it meant when I woke up. A full interpretation of this dream would take a long time to explain here but Neil did the job right for me. I gave up drinking Coke.

As more and more fear, stress, and grief piled up on me throughout these difficulties, my hair became noticeably thinner. In the beginning I was distressed about it.  I bought a wig.  And then I bought another wig.  And then I bought another wig. I never wore any of them because I just could not make myself do it.  It was not me that I saw in the mirror when I would try them on. So I just kept on doing what I always do which is play the glad game and keep going because the situation wasn’t actually as dire as it might seem, yet.  I began adding more vitamins and supplements to my diet to strengthen my hair and hoped that what was happening might be a deficiency of some sort.  When that didn’t help, I started a modified KETO diet and I actually did get some results with that in many very good ways but it didn’t address the hair loss situation.  Then came the dream. I saw my plumber coming out of a supermarket in a town where I used to live. The tap water in that town was god-awful tasting and smelling, so I knew what this meant immediately. The bottled water that I had been drinking was too alkaline, I discovered, and this was a major contributor to my hair loss. I was thrilled to learn that giving up the bottled water might be my salvation.  Well, not so fast.  There is a thing called cortisol that our body produces to help the system cope with high levels of stress. Give up all the water that you like. You will also have to reduce your stress level and bring down the cortisol.  HA! Make that happen if you can!

Scene Change.

I was watching The Police’s video for Walking On The Moon not long ago and I noticed how Sting’s hair was cut in it.  I began to wonder if a style like that might improve the appearance of my own hair since a shorter style might make the thinness of my hair seem less noticeable. I was able to find a hair style that was similar to Sting’s on the web but it was a little longer.  Hopefully, if it looked less masculine than Sting’s hair, I thought that I might be able to pull off that look and still look like a female and not like a teenaged boy. Finally, yesterday, I cut my hair.  The style of the cut did actually improve the look of my hair. It is noticeably thicker looking on top. I was at least half pleased with the result. So, I went to bed last night with a reasonably good feeling about what I had done. Then there was that moment this morning when I looked in the mirror and thought, WHO THE HELL IS THAT?????!!!!!

And now, back to Les Miserables.

As I assessed my new look in the mirror this morning, I realized exactly who I looked like; Angela Pleasence in Les Miserables. I LOOK LIKE A FREAKING 18th CENTURY FRENCH PROSTITUTE! Oh my god, what a wakeup call! Talk about going back to the past! The funny thing is, that is probably not too far off the mark for me when you consider that I have had past lives where I was maybe only marginally above being that when you factor in that I was pretty lax in the morals department in possibly more than one lifetime. Whew!  Practice what you preach, Psychic, when you get a look at yourself with the image of what you were probably pretty close to being once upon a time!

So, I have done what I have been telling people to do since 2014. I went back to the past when I found the future look for myself. My salvation here is that I can work around my French Prostitute hairstyle.  I can add some cosmetics, a stylish outfit and maybe a cloche hat to level it all out.  I just won’t stand on any street corners. There was no salvation for the real deal prostitute in the 18th century.  While we struggle here in 2022 with all of the problems that we have created for ourselves and the future doesn’t look all that rosy anymore, I cannot help feeling grateful for all of the ways that I can manage some of my problems where my past life selves never could.  Not when stealing a loaf of bread could get you prison time and a life long struggle to reclaim your life if that was even possible at all. So, I will stay mad about the politics and the bullying and aggression that I see every day now, but I will not get into a twist about seeing my past lives in technicolor when I look in the mirror again. Options are here for me if I can manage to hang on to them while the inflation rate cuts deeply in to my pocket book and nice people are hard to find. I am still glad to be here and still glad that I bought the wigs…just in case.

Vive la France. You speak to me even now.