The Red-Head Connection

To My Youngers,

When we were younger Mom had a simple solution for fighting-over-toys syndrome- we would each have toys whose hair colour matched our own (mine being red, A's blond and K's brown). As far as parenting goes, a pretty ingenious system, as we could hardly claim that a doll was ours when it clearly did not match the top of our head!

Now If you recall in any way dolls of the 80s (and pre-80s, and post 80s....) most 'main character' dolls were blond. With the exception of Strawberry Shortcake and arguably Rainbow Bright (The 'blond' character's hair was actually yellow, so I decided Rainbow Bright's orange hair counted as 'red'...) the blond characters had the biggest personalities, had the main love interest, had all the prettiest clothes, all the attention and were basically the focus of every story. The brunettes were usually a little wilder, wore more daring clothes, had more adventuresome tendencies. They would be the one to bring home a stray dragon and keep it as a pet.

And the red-heads were the sidekicks. The goofy ones who made clever remarks, the freckle-faced dark horse who always seemed to be in the background, overcoming their shyness only in times of great need to save their friends from certain destruction ("Why did it have to be spiders? Why couldn't it be butterflies?").

Any of this sound familiar? A? K? Anyone who knows any of us? ;o)

I've always loved sidekicks, I've always had a soft spot for freckled read-heads. They're my favourites in books, movies, real life... I made the connection for myself a long while ago, but I was particularly entertained by the thought that A and K were equally affected by our childhood doll-distribution!

Oh how we are shaped by our environments...

-E