Stroke, stroke, bail…bail..bail…bail! If only you could hear my accent. Moose and Squirrel, Boris and Natasha (did anyone else see her resemblance to the original Barbie?), Dudley Do-Right, Mr Peabody and his boy Sherman. My brother and I loved them all, and reveled in the silliness of the Cold War cartoons with our heroes always defeating the sinister Mr. Big and the witless Soviet spies, the clueless Canadian Mountie who somehow always got his man, and the super-intelligent dog and his Way-Back machine, where we learned some form of history. Bigger than a breadbox, smaller than Texas; it must be Mount Flatten! It was a half hour of bliss within the format of a fractured fairy tale and we felt we were very sophisticated to “get” it.

We couldn’t wait for the cartoon to come on, gladly putting aside any homework, music practice, anything else on our schedules. It was Must-See TV in our household. Later in life, I bought several compilations on VHS format and my kids loved it as much as I had; second generation confirmation of good taste. My younger child, now 27, was saddened when those tapes were ruined two years ago in a massive flood, as they are no longer available in any format. How will we now pass it along for future generations? These days seem ripe for such inspired, clever nonsense.

At a younger age, my brother and I also loved the Disney full-length animated feature films. My first film was Fantasia, my brother’s was Peter Pan, but we both loved Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Dumbo. Bambi. Snow White was before our time, but we saw it when it was re-released. The animation of all of these remains stunning and the music is still singable. I can probably sing all of it right now (of course Disney got help from Tchaikovsky for Sleeping Beauty, but it worked). He was also the master of making the beautiful into the nightmare – he turned out some really scary sequences in all those movies and had us young ones diving for the covers for weeks after seeing those films.

In 1970, just before my brother headed to Israel for two years, Fantasia was re-released and my super-straight brother and I went to see it again. He didn’t know that the hippies had discovered this was a great movie to trip out to and was bewildered by the crowd that showed up at our local theater that evening. I was just amused. The music and animation remain superb; stunning, swirling sequences. One wonders what the animators were high on while imagining those episodes, so long ago.

My brother and I had the worst fight of our lives when he was 8 and I was 3 over a Disney-inspired moment. We had a window seat in our wood-paneled den in Detroit. We each liked to use it as a space on which to play. I was doing a little production with my dolls when he, being much larger, pushed me aside to use it as a desk. He was re-creating a Cinderella ad on a pad of white paper. I tried to shove him back to get my space back, but was unsuccessful. With anger and deliberation, I marched behind him and bit him where I could reach him…on the butt cheeks! He howled in pain. I got my performance space back for a millisecond until our mother showed up and sent me to my room for an hour. Cinderella triumphed. I sulked. My brother and I both got over it and remain the best of friends and both Disney loyalists forever.

Imagine his mortification when the performers assemble on stage completely naked.
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The musical Hair opened on Broadway in April 1968, and I saw it some time that spring with my friend Amy, who lived in Manhattan. Amy had been my roommate the previous summer at a program for high school students at Syracuse University. It was Amy who first introduced me to marijuana, so it was fitting that we went to see Hair together. We were probably stoned at the time. We adored this groundbreaking show that glorified long hair, and hippies, and drugs, and the anti-war movement. The title of my story, as you may have recognized, is a lyric from the title song.

My hair was a focal point of my life long before that musical, and has continued to be throughout my life. Hair in the places it was NOT wanted was, over the years, bleached, waxed, shaved, tweezed, electrolyzed, and lasered. Hair where it WAS wanted, on my head, was braided, ponytailed, teased, straightened, dyed, grown long, cut short, and never, ever exactly the way I wanted it. Much more than clothes or shoes or make-up, it was the degree of my satisfaction with my hair that always determined whether I felt good about my appearance on any given occasion.

In high school and college, when it was so, so important to have long, perfectly pin-straight hair, my curly locks were the bane of my existence. I used home hair straighteners with names like Curl Free and Uncurl, which would work for a few weeks, unless it rained. I also had it professionally straightened at the beauty parlor, but that was only a little more successful. Ultimately I took to ironing my hair to get it straight. This entailed kneeling down in front of the ironing board and spreading sections of my long hair over the board. Holding my hairbrush in one hand and the iron in the other, I would use the brush to pull the hair taut, then follow the brush with the iron over the entire length of the hair. Since I couldn’t see what I was doing, I would sometimes start to put the iron down on the hand holding the brush, and I would end up with little triangular burn marks on my brush hand from the tip of the iron. But I achieved the result of long straight hair, parted in the middle, that was so crucial at that time. I started growing it long at the beginning of high school, and continued all through college and law school, with only occasional trims. At its longest it was below my waist. Always, I ironed it to make it pin straight, and always if there was rain or high humidity, it curled anyway.

Janis Joplin was the first celebrity I can remember who let her curly hair be natural. Much as I loved her, I was still more interested in looking like Joan Baez or Joni Mitchell. However, as the ’70s were coming to a close, I finally surrendered to my curl. Having graduated from law school, now working at my first “real” job, where I frequently appeared in court against much older (male) attorneys, I wanted to look professional, and I wanted to look older. Both of these goals seemed to dictate cutting my hair short. Once it was short, it was impossible to keep it straight, because it was the weight of my long hair that had helped to control it at least somewhat. So I started investigating curly hair styles. In the decades since then my hair length has fluctuated up and down, but I have always let it be curly. Hairdressers now invariably rave about how wonderful my curls are, and I just have to laugh and say “Where were you in the ’60s?”

3 generations of curly hair, circa 2000

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday.
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