Wigs are my superhero costume

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 23:30:00 +0000

I was sitting at my kitchen table with a guy I’d met earlier that night. It was some dark hour beyond midnight, maybe 2 a.m., maybe 4 a.m., and I was wearing a pink cotton robe from Japan that made me feel like a geisha. I was also wearing a wig.

“I wish you’d take that thing off,” the guy said, as we both sipped our beer.

“Why?” I said, propping my bare legs on his lap. I liked that wig. It was magenta, a fiery and improbable color, and its long, flippy layers draped across my shoulders with architectural perfection.

The wig also looked surprisingly natural on me, like I was born to wear a fiery and improbable drag. I wore it to a bar on the Lower East Side, and it was such a trip to realize that every stranger believed this weird lie about me. Nobody thought I was wearing a wig, because why on earth would I be? The next day I posted a picture of myself on Facebook in that wig, and even my friends bought it. The comments exploded. Yowzah love your new hair. And the compliments were so frothy, and felt so good, that I couldn’t bring myself to puncture the magic.

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Wigs are my superhero costume