Ladies, a plate!

I arrived with a plate of pikelets; cream and raspberry jam. Now I'm overwhelmed.

There are some seriously culinary enabled women in this blogosphere specialising in bite size morsels of wit, charm, and an eye for the main chance. What to do with pikelets?

My mother spoke of this angst. It was one of the defining moments for a seventies housewife. Invited to a gathering of like-minded women you met at Plunket or your husband's work do, you brought a plate of your homemade best.

And it sat there - picked around, moved aside, overlooked, but never picked over.

My mother would actually plea bargain with God. A cleared plate correlated with high self-esteem. The untouched plate, was, well, untouched and by implication, untouchable.

I'm biting my lip here. The butter is yellowing with the light and the cream is no longer stiff peaks of pleasure. The hausfrau's prayer is on the tip of my tongue.

Perhaps I'll just have one myself. Maybe two...

A brief affair

Spiral perms were cool once - long and lustrous, and just a bit racy. Sexy tresses designed to flick around a bit for boys.

I'm not an early adopter when it comes to hair. I, gladly, waited out the assymetrical phase. But something about the spiral perm beckoned. I think it was Carmel. I wanted to be just a little more like her. The perm was a tangible expression of my identity shift, or so I thought.

I saved the $80 dollars by holding back on my weekly petrol allowance. In those days you could actually buy petrol, and lots of it, for $5 a week - it was the proverbial 'smell of an oily rag' thing. So I saved and saved and grew my fine and somewhat limp 'do so that it would still swing long after the perm.

After 3 hours in the salon and a chemical scalp peel (pre-dermabrasion) I gingerly walked the two blocks to my mother's office for a ride home. I was dying to hear how the new me was catching on.

She looked up from her adding machine and noted that today was Thursday and that she thought I was getting my hair permed Thursday.

To say that it had fallen out is to imply a hold that was, in reality, probably never there. Sure, there was a vaguely touseled thing going on, but not even in the sexy bed-hair kind of way - just the 'here, use this' (comb from your mother's purse) kind of way.

My entre to blogging is very much reminiscent of this sad hair tale.

A star may well have been born, but it was all more of a pouf than an atmospheric combustion - a scientology star, if you like, born in silence.

You see, immediately after posting something, anything, to get the account open, I screwed up my login and zambesigirl was seemingly lost to me forever. Such a brief affair... a lot like the spiral perm.