My dear friend Dale sends me the following email. I am not quite sure if this is a desire on his part, or a warning (this is great because I have been lax in my writing and this strikes me as hilarious)-
Will rare redheads be extinct by 2100?
Article: She was just walking down the street with her sister, in her old neighborhood, when an elderly woman stopped her car in front of her and called out, "I love your hair! It's so beautiful!" Caitlin Tydings was about 8 then, and caught off guard. Now a high-school senior, she has since grown accustomed to strangers commenting on her strawberry-blond locks.
[Me: ... and her pale white pasty skin, fondly known as "Chalkcasian"; the 10,000,000 freckles of various shades of brown, shapes and odd sizes and let's not forget the red "ruddy" hue to her skin in odd patches at strange times... this HAD to be her grandma shouting...]
Article: If predictions by the Oxford Hair Foundation come to pass, the number of natural redheads everywhere will continue to dwindle until there are none left by the year 2100.
[Me: Is this a dream or mere speculation by men who have dated, married, or talked with us...?]
Article: The reason, according to scientists at the independent institute in England, which studies all sorts of hair problems, is that just 4 percent of the world's population carries the red-hair gene. The gene is recessive and therefore diluted when carriers produce children with people who have the dominant brown-hair gene.
[Me: At first I read "recessive" as "regressive' and took offense, although if we use this word instead ... it might explain a great deal about me and the men I date.]
Article: Dr. John Gray's explanation of his foundation's findings: "The way things are going, red hair will either be extremely rare or extinct by the end of the century."
[Me: I am picturing all my ex's lining up to ask for a more exact date, time, and place. I think we have given them hope and a new meaning to their lives.]
Article: Red hair certainly has made the endangered list. But with 4 percent of 6.4 billion people carrying the gene, says University of Rochester Medical Center's David Pearce, it is too large a figure to be wiped out completely in the next 95 years.
[Me: Great, so now I am on a list with the African wild ass, the Black rhino, the Pygmy hog, Visayan warty pig and the illustrious Bactrian camel. Any resemblance to fellow endangered species is purely speculative, although there may be people who beg to differ.]
Article: "I think someone may want to check their calculator," Pearce says. The red-hair gene "will dilute out and become rare, but there are a variety of other factors that can change hair color that are not really understood well right now." The gene responsible for red hair was only discovered in the late 1990s. People have a good chance of being born with red hair if they have a mutation of that gene.
[Me: I just love being described as recessive, endangered and mutant. Did me and the scientist date at some point in my past? Throw in a little affliction, fascination, perturbation then stir and we've got a pretty good description of life with a redhead...]
Article: Red hair is found in all ethnic backgrounds but is most commonly associated with people of Celtic descent. Red hair skipped two generations before sprouting on Brianna McBride, a 5-year-old preschooler from Penfield, N.Y. It comes from her great-grandmother on her father's side.
[Me: Luckily, not the mailman...]
Article: "As a baby, we'd be in the store and people would always try to touch her head. She didn't like that, so she was very shy," recalls her mom, Alice. As Brianna got older, "we started to point out other redheads, and she started understanding." Now, her mom adds, "she looks forward to the attention. She has really learned how to use it."
[Me: Note to her mother- RUN FOR YOUR LIFE now while you still have your wits about you.]
Why redheads are news fit to print is beyond me. Maybe it was a slow day in New York, or the scientist at Oxford woke up with one shaved eyebrow, soap on his toothbrush, all toilet paper missing, and his fingernails painted bright red after telling his redheaded girlfriend he wanted to see other people ... He was hoping all redheads will soon disappear from the face of the earth...
Yeah, but we will be messing with heavens above ... there is just no escaping us.
Until next time-
C
