Gram's little helperBlue rinse is described as a dilute
dye used to color the greying hair of middle aged and older women. It covers the sometimes translucent (showing scalp color), or the yellowish tint that sometimes develops, usually as a result of heavy smoking. Blue rinse isn't known to have restorative powers for the yellow
nicotine stains sometimes visible on the fingers of said smokers. There is something rather jarring about seeing an elderly woman with blue hair and yellowed fingers, but that may just be me.
Code blue
Blue rinse isn't valuable only to the ladies who employ its wiles. If you drive on the highways, be on the lookout for blue rinse. It's one of the telltales that will alert you that you're following a driver who may be less than compos mentis. True, the lady in question won't have a cellphone grafted to the side of her head in an unholy amalgam of human and machine, but she has been around the block many times over. Remember, forewarned is forearmed. Another tip off that will help you spot the poor lady (as if the blue rinse itself isn't a dead giveaway) is the sight of bony knuckles clinching the steering wheel in a deathgrip at the approved locations of 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock. These 2 factors plus the fact that she's barreling along at a brisk 40 miles per hour completes the warning picture.
If you feel the need for speed, forget it. The blue rinsed driver doesn't realize that her Plymouth Volare came with either an interior or exterior rearview mirror. She is like an asteroid blazing (at 40 MPH) through the cosmos. She isn't going to deviate from her trajectory for anything so trivial as traffic backed up behind her for 3 miles.
What's not to like?
The blue rinse ladies have a lot going for them. Chances are fairly good that they don't have any tats or piercings, not that you'd want to venture a peek anyway. You've seen some of these ladies, right? A tat of a dragon after 50 years looks disturbingly similar to a petrified bat. That vine that was so cute when Richard Nixon was inaugurated will now be mistaken for strands of barbed wire around Stalag 17. A piercing through her lip would bring up visions of that large mouth bass that got away because you were beer sotted and dropped your pole overboard. Bad juju all the way around. Think good thoughts, imagine pretty sunsets, cleanse your mind.
She's a brick house, good God a'mighty
Oh, I'm sorry, I got lost for a moment there. The blue rinse ladies can probably make a blueberry cobbler. That's a good thing, especially since she knows to have vanilla ice cream in the freezer to go along with it. She knows how to do laundry, how to cook lots of goodies, how to pot a plant. If it weren't for her, think of all the human knowledge that'd be right out the window. Don't even try to tell me that you know how to pot a plant. You might know how to plant pot, but that isn't necessarily the same thing.
Hey officer, I thought she was being attacked!
Blue rinse helps ladies maintain their dignity, their self-image, their decorum. It helps their husbands and the friends of their husbands to not shoot at them because they were mistaken for a possum. Trust me, you don't want to have an involved conversation with an armed officer because you thought a woman had a marsupial on her head. There aren't a lot of blue possums waddling about. It should be a law to have any lady who walks into the woods to wear blaze orange and blue rinse their hair. It'll make the hunting accident statistics look much better.
The blue crew
If you feel the need to cruise in the environs where blue rinse gals naturally congregate, try staking out your local bingo parlor. If you watch the comings and goings and don't see blue rinse, check where you're at, because it isn't the bingo parlor. Almost anywhere in Florida will serve the purpose. Florida has a higher concentration of blue rinse ladies per 1000 population than Paris has of Frenchmen. Remember, numbers are on my side. Chances are that by the time she gets around to a good blue rinse job she's already a widow.
Let me dip my beak
I've spent considerable time thinking about the lucre that'd be rolling in if I could just corner the market for blue rinse in Florida. Forget the Powerball, who needs the Mega-million jackpot. Those are one shot wonders, a flash in the pan. The blue rinse franchise would pay off day in and day out like a dairy cow squirting milk. Blue rinse would pay out the ultimate ching, the kind that translates into bling!
Mayday, Mayday!
I've kind of run aground on my plan to become a blue rinse magnate though. I can't quite figure out how to get it accomplished. If you can help me with the sordid details I think I can get you into a lucrative sideline like the hernia truss market or hearing aid battery bizz. Have your people call my people and we'll hook up, do lunch, make a deal, what do you say?