Lookin' Good. Both of You

I saw a woman with a split personality last night.

I don’t mean the common and fast disappearing (I’m delighted to say) misconception about what schizophrenia is. (Remember the bumper sticker? Schizophrenia means you’re never alone. Yeah, well, not like that.)

No, this woman must have genuinely had a couple of people living inside her.

I was at a shopping centre with Emergency Contact, doing the weekly shopping. Broadway shopping centre is big and busy. It has a lot of people in it. So many people in fact, that Coles thinks it can pack more in by making the aisles 1.8 trolleys wide. Another time to complete that particular gripe perhaps, but what I’m getting at here is - this woman was not alone. She was not alone in a way that, say, by accidentally looking in the wrong direction for a second, she could think she was alone.

You know when you think you’re in an aisle by yourself and you take the opportunity to straighten your arms over the shopping trolley, suspending yourself above the floor, so you can make huge exaggerated steps and then launch into a Neal Armstrong monologue in faux 1960’s radio voice, and when you stop to reach up for a jar of pickled herrings, there’s a small teenage girl looking at you with the type of withering look that only a teenage girl can muster? We’ve all been there. Well, that moment would not be possible in the shopping centre we were in. People. Everywhere.

So, one of this woman’s personalities is vain enough to think that her life will be improved by having her hair dyed. Being a four-foot-nothing, spherical, middle aged dowager, with pigeon toes and a squint, the attempt to cover the odd grey hair with mound of mission brown hair dye was going to improve her life.

The other personality was a lot more matter of fact. In a bold “who gives a rat’s patootie” move, this personality decided it was perfectly ok to stagger around a shopping centre with the cling-wrap (complete with steaming dye underneath) still wrapped around her head.