Marion Roach Quotes

All the action adventure girls have red hair," he said. "Whenever it is an independent girl, not a sidekick person, when she has her own mind or does as good as the guys, she has red hair.

But any idea of plainness is simply contrary to the fancy color that is red.

This is because I define myself in part by my color. And I know it is the proverbial slippery slope: That there are associations with red hair that I utterly reject and others I wear proudly means nothing to anyone else, since I don't get to choose how the observer sorts those same traits. Grazing through the stereotypes, I am on the delicatessen plan, winding a way over the menu offerings, picking, choosing and rejecting; adhering to some, dismissing others. Having adopted a method of personal vigilance that allows me to be on the lookout for associations that suffuse my color with preferred associations and to reject those I choose not to adopt, I enhance my self-image. But to other people my red hair is more a take-it-or-leave-it experience: Red-haired, to them, I may also be a certain type of person, complete with temperament.

Redheads are a variant that survived, a color minority, though not a skin color precisely, not a race, but still subject to identification by the wary eyes and wagging tongues of the majority.

I can't help thinking: Am I related in some traceable way to all redheads, if there were any such genetic thing as "all redheads"?

Blondes are the girlfriend, brunete is the femme fatale, but the heroine, she's the redheaded girl.