Thanks (I Think): Thoughts On Annie Lennox

The guy working the cash at the liquor store didn’t card me, but he did tell me I look like Annie Lennox. It’s now hours later and I am in the little room, smoking and wondering what liquor store guy meant.

My hair is short, recently chopped into a champagne blond pixie cut that my mother thinks is so cute until I run a fistful of gel through it, forcing it to stand straight up on-end or comb it all neatly back off my face, until it’s slick and hard to the touch when it dries.

I wear lipstick and eyeliner and skirts. I also have a half-dozen men’s suit and smoking jackets in my wardrobe, thrifted and prized. My favourite is the deep green velvet with the black braid trim. I have short hair and like men’s jackets, but I’m no man.

Annie Lennox isn’t a man and I like her. I have all the Eurythmics albums to-date and at least three 12-inch singles. On import. She looks, cool, interesting, I tell myself. It’s a compliment.

Or maybe liquor store guy just meant that my hair was like Annie Lennox’s. Or my face — it’s kind of long like hers, I guess. I always pick “oval shape” when doing the best-beauty-look quizzes in Seventeen. Maybe he meant I look like a girl who looks like a guy, the way some people are always getting on Annie about. Maybe he meant I’m just not pretty.

I might cry. I can’t sleep.

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Image: Annie Lennox, photographed by Kazumi Kurigami for Vogue, July 1984.

Welcome to the Little Room is a series of 250-word re-imagined vignettes from my ’80s youth with a focus on music and style. It appears weekly on periodicult.com.