That might be the most unlikely title of all times. Lipstick is very low on my list of vocabulary, but I woke up in a commercial for the product, a dream commercial.
The announcer was listing the features. “But wait, there’s more…” It is a style of advertising that was used in my youth. Endless add ons, low, low prices. The advertised machine had a gold colored cube. Apparently, lipstick could be melted and remolded, even recolored, and when it went into this cube, it would come out tube ready.
So the apparatus allowed a person to mold, color, and re-purpose the ends of used product.
I don’t wear lipstick. Or, I only wear lipstick on the most interesting of days, and even then, the color would not contrast a regular lip tone. Lipstick appears once a year, maybe.
My mom wore lipstick every day. Every day. Each one. She ascribed to a mantra that declares that lipstick resets your life. When things started to slide, a little lipstick brings the world back to order. (We should all be wearing lipstick right now.)
Mom grabbed the lipstick tube before she left the house, before Dad came home, when something puzzling was bothering her, and when a car drove into the driveway. I found her behavior as odd as she found mine.
Coffee and lipstick. She could not understand my opposition to either. She honestly believed I would pick up the habits somewhere along the way, that she had failed me, or that I was being rebellious. When I left for college, traveled to Central Washington University, that was when everything was supposed to fall into place. But my habits didn’t change.
Google spit out a long list of dream meanings. My favorite was “harmony and affluence ahead.” Mom would have picked harmony. Wearing lipstick created a mindset of inner harmony that could spread to all she touched, through words spoken lovingly, through a smile or a kiss. Mom rocked the gloss.
I am looking for something like lipstick. What do I do that can reset the world? In just one moment. Restart. Reprogram. Relieve the burden. Instantly. I could do Burt’s Bees. There’s still time.
micheleplumbstowell.org 