The coven

"REAL WITCHES dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women. They live in ordinary houses and they work in ORDINARY JOBS ... '[But] a REAL WITCH is always bald ... bald as a boiled egg ... A REAL WITCH always wears a wig to hide her baldness. She wears a first-class wig. And it is almost impossible to tell a really first-class wig from ordinary hair unless you give it a pull to see if it comes off ... Mind you, these wigs do cause a rather serious problem for witches. They make the scalp itch most terribly. You see, when an actress wears a wig, or if you or I were to wear a wig, we would be putting it on over our own hair, but a witch has to put it straight on to her naked scalp. And the underneath of a wig is always very rough and scratchy. It sets up a frightful itch on the bald skin ...'" According to The Witches, by Roald Dahl, witches constantly sneak their hands underneath their wigs to scratch their itchy scalps. The rims of their nostrils are pink and curvy, and they have a distorted sense of smell. They have deformed feet, which they hide in pretty shoes ...

The other evening, I was at a lecture for women with metastatic breast cancer, and midway through, I realized that at least half the women around me in the audience were probably wearing wigs, since most women with metastatic disease are on chemo for life; and they had pink nostrils, since chemo causes the nasal passages to shed their cilia-like hair and become irritated; and they probably had distorted sense of smell and taste (perhaps causing little boys to smell like dog droppings), since chemo does that; and they probably lacked toe-nails, since chemo loosens nails; and ...

But witches created by modern medicine also have special powers. And there was a whiff of that in the auditorium as well—ferocious determination to survive, fierce intelligence and curiosity, a no-bullshit sensibility.

So, scary and sad as it was to be in a coven, it was thrilling too.