Quirky Monday: I Simultaneously Colored My Hair 9 Different Colors. On Purpose.

Brown, green, purple, dark blue, light blue, white, yellow, orange and some-weird-florescent-y gray/white-something-or-other.

All nine of those colors.

Plus an extra dollop of gel, and probably half a bottle of hairspray--just in case.

That's what was in my hair.

On purpose.

I'm not even kidding.

 Sounds gross, right? Would you believe I actually enjoyed that? Because while I did have hair that looked like--something else--I also got to caper around onstage calling myself "precious".

Because I was in a production of The Hobbit.  As Gollum.

Only I didn't look this good. Bad. Whatever.

Question: What do you do when you cast a very attractive(if I do say so myself) girl to play some slimy, pitiful ugly creature that nobody really wants anything to do with?

Answer: You make her "ugly" and turn her into a stick.

Cue black unitard that squeezed my already skinny body into an emaciated version of myself. And when I say emaciated, I mean you could see every single one of my ribs through that thing--scratch that; you could see every bone in my body though that thing.

Add to that a bunch of ratted fabric and faux hula grass attached to various places on my body and ugly rubber mask that made me look like something from the Living Dead.

Gollum Transformation: Ugly stick body? Check.

Yes, I was literally this skinny. Only I was in a black unitard, not a CGI suite. 

What to do with my beautiful hair was a problem.

I love my hair. But it's so fine that it can be difficult to manage, even when it's short; and it wasn't helping the designers either. They wanted me to wear a "wig" made of the same faux hula grass stuff they stuck to other parts of me, and it looked great under the lights.

Except my hair would show through.

A lot.

Gollum does not have really nice hair.

 At all.

Big problem.

Question: if you want to put Gollum in a wig and hide the fact that this actor(me) has really nice hair what do you do?

You color it nine different colors. At the same time.

And then gel it to her head.

With half a bottle of hairspray to top it off.

You know, just in case her hair (inevitably) happens to show through the faux hula grass wig.

This is what they used on me. Yeah, that's not the color of the bottle. It's the color of the gel inside the bottle. 

 Ok, so it was temporary washout stuff(Biosilk Rock Hard Gelee, in case you're interested), but still!

Do you know what color you get when you mix brown, green, purple, dark blue, light blue, white, yellow, orange and some-weird-florescent-y gray/white-something-or-other and then slather it into your hair?

I'll tell you----

No I cant.

I'll gag.

Use your imagination.

Gollum Transformation: Ugly hair? Check!

From really attractive girl to hideously ugly--thingummy? Check, check!

Every night.

For a month.

I have never enjoyed looking so hideous in my life!

This is one of the reasons I am a theatre artist. Because I get to do crazy quirky stuff like this. All the time!