The Pearl Test

As babies grow to toddlers, as toddlers grow to bigger children, as children grow to teenagers, and as teenagers grow to adults, we accumulate things. Among these things that we accumulate are scars.

If you take a close look at people they all have scars. Some people cover facial scars with makeup or hair combed over them. A lot of scars are covered with clothing.

Scars are caused by hundreds of things and/or people. I have a really bad scar on my arm caused by surgeries to fix a badly crushed arm from a car accident. I have a scar on my hip from a bone transplant. I have oodles of scars on my face and arm from skin cancer surgeries. Well, there is also a scar from an appendectomy, and one tiny little scar when you look at it closely looks like something took a scoop out of my leg.

The amount of blood that I lost when that accident happened was unbelievable. The scar is on my shin and the accident happened when I was having a shower. I was fifteen years old and was shampooing my hair with a shampoo called Prell. Many of you won’t know about Prell, but in the early days it was packaged in a glass bottle that looked kind of like an hour glass. Any fool would realize that when you get lather all over your hands a glass bottle is going to just slide right out and smash on the floor of the shower. Well, that’s exactly what happened with shards of glass flying all over me and the wall and the floor. There was a trick to get the shampoo out of my eyes and hair and shut the water off and get out of the shower without causing myself more mortal injury than had already been done.

The funny part of this story, if there is one, is that Prell shampoo was so widely advertised for it’s ability to make you glamorous and it’s thickness in the bottle was demonstrated by a pearl being dropped in the bottle. The pearl took forever to get to the bottom of the bottle so therefore, it was marvelous for your hair. Now remember my age, fifteen. About eight years later, Prell had added a new marketing technique. They had added Prell in a tube that you just squeezed into your hand when you were in the shower. I always figured it was because there were other people besides me that took chips out of their legs. Well, I wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, so I continued to buy Prell in the bottle. Prell was a beautiful emerald green color. My little girl was about a year and a half old and toddled into the bathroom and reached for the bottle and it smashed into the tub and green shampoo all over the place.

I didn’t think it was a big deal and I went to work to clean up the glass. That was done in a minute because it broke into three big pieces. Then came the cleaning up of the shampoo itself. I had the worst time of my life. It came up the stool, it came up the bathroom sink, it would not go down the tub drain. It took several hours to get it taken care of. I never bought Prell again. Oh, and for those of you that are wondering about my little one, I was right behind her and put her in her highchair while I cleaned it up. They quit selling that shampoo a few years later hmm wonder why.

You might want to take a close look at how much that bottle of Prell cost in the sixties.