“Nice hair.”
These words mean different things to people depending on their culture, environment and social norms.
I was born in 1960. So what did my eyes see as a teenager when I read “Seventeen” and “Young Miss”? Girls with long, straight hair parted on the side and falling smoothly past their shoulders. That was beautiful hair. Since 1973, it was all I wanted. Spoiler: I never got it.
If I had the money, I would wear a lace front wig and sling those curls all over town. But I don’t, so I won’t.
Julie Smith
What I got was uncontrollable, unruly and unmanageable hair. It manages to be – all at once! – thin, coarse, limp, puffy, wiry, flat, frizzy, straight and frizzy. I wake up in the morning looking like I’ve been electrocuted or dragged backwards through a bramble bush. Sometimes both.
Hairdressers (not to mention a few husbands) have looked at my morning haircut with amazement, as if they were amazed by a typing goat or a talking horse.
Years ago, a hairdresser calmly parted my hair and cut it into sections while counting the whorls.
“So,” she finally announced, “you have four whorls – on your head, your forehead and your temples. And there is no natural parting, which is why it stands straight up.”
She paused and looked into my eyes in the mirror. “Let me think about this for a minute.”
God bless her, she had enough talent and inspiration to give me a beautiful cut, a beautiful wash, and a beautiful blow-dry. It was smooth, it was sleek, it was shiny. It fell over my shoulders! And then I went outside. In the 10 minutes it took me to get home, I went from Jennifer Anniston to Roseanne Rosannadanna.
I have my parents to thank for that: Dad’s thick, wild, wavy hair met Mom’s smooth, baby-fine curls that went limp when a cloud moved in front of the sun, and the result was hair that I have been taming for 60 years.
I wore it long and looked like a pirate. I wore it short and looked like a walking scourer. Now it’s either a ponytail or a bun and that’s it.
