Britney Went Bald

Recently my 14-year-old daughter recalled how, while still in middle school, her classmates insisted she looked exactly like Britney Spears. If only she had dressed and acted like her, she could be Britney's little sis! My daughter audibly, sighed at this memory, "I just never saw the resemblance."

Last week Britney checked herself out only 24 hours after entering a substance rehabilitation program in the Carribbean. A few days later she was spotted buzz-cutting her head at a San Fernando Valley hair salon, and then, receiving several dainty tatoos at a Sherman Oaks, California tatoo parlor.

A bystander interviewed by L.A.'s KABC-TV, which filmed Spears heading into Body & Soul Tattoo on Ventura Boulevard, said that the pop star had shaved her head because "she didn't want people touching her anymore."

My first reaction to Britney's baldness was to recall Melissa Etheridge at the 2005 Grammy's singing "Piece of My Heart" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zus0m6VIXY
Melissa, radiant with wisdom, awash with real emotion, let out a primal scream, releasing six months of pain from chemotherapy for breast cancer. She was screaming for all of us. She could have been screaming for Britney.

All during her adolescence, while girls in her age cohort were trying out different looks, refining their thoughts, and re-inventing their identities, Britney was being created by the media who owned her. Britney's early music paralleled and personified the control exerted over her by the recording companies. This girl learned in her tweens to be enslaved and used by the corporate big daddy, as in "Baby One More Time" ". . .When I'm not with you I lose my mind, Give me a sign, Hit me baby one more time . . .The reason I breathe is you. . . Show me, how you want it to be . . . "

Perhaps Britney is becoming the girl she describes in "Overprotected," where she tell us to "Say hello to the girl that I am! You're gonna have to see through my perspective I need to make mistakes just to learn who I am. . . so fed up with people telling me to be Someone else but me."

Go ahead, Britney, shave that head, get some tatoos, and try out some of your own identities. To do that you will have to feel your own feelings, think your own thoughts, and sing your own songs. When you are ready, let out a scream that comes from way deep in that place where feelings have been pushed down and drugged, blunted by alcohol, and smothered by some made-up image forced upon you.

By the time you let that scream out, you will be so real, so in touch with yourself, that all the girrrls will recognize you. Maybe then my daughter will see the resemblance.