Every Day Was a Bad Hair Day

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When I was in junior high, the hairstyle to aim for was straight, shiny (see Breck ads), and rolled up  at the ends. My friend Linda always had perfect hair, a shoulder-length sheet ending in a neat hair-tube curving around the back of her neck. I had no success at this. Curlers would fall out in the night. Locks of hair would flop or go askew. Then all day I’d be conscious that I looked wrong, wrong, wrong.

For a while I had shorter hair that required me to wind the pieces in front of my ears around my finger into pincurls at night and clamp them in place with crossed bobby pins. I had puffed bangs, and at their central point I pinned a tiny velvet bow each day, a different color to go with whatever outfit I was wearing. The effect was supposed to be cute and perky, two adjectives not applicable to me. Also, the bows would lose their grip and slide sideways and down as the day went on.

Somewhat later there was the sprayed-in-place style that made your head bubble-shaped and the surface of your hair hard enough to knock on. There was also the poodle cut. Did I ever have a poodle cut? I believe I did, briefly. I prefer not to think about it.

In high school once, we had something called Grub Day, when we could wear jeans and do our hair any way we wanted to. I let my hair alone that day, and it was the only day in all those years that I really felt I looked good. I looked like myself. Luckily, a few years after high school, the Sixties arrived and my hair was finally set free.

 

I Always Wanted Long Hair

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I guess girls are supposed to have hair. I was born bald so my brother, five years my elder, called me “Boop-dy Boy”. He was confused. Eventually I grew hair, nice, shiny, straight, almost black hair. I always wanted to grow it long. My mother, for some reason which she never shared with me, wouldn’t let me, so I had the classic “Dutch Boy” bob as a child, though I craved long, flowing locks.

I learned to wash it from my father, using Prell; lovely, green, drop-a-pearl-in-it-and-watch-it-float-gently-to-the-bottom Prell Shampoo. I can trace the trajectory of my hair to the change in my hormones. With puberty came body and a slight wave to what was once perfectly straight hair. As I wrested control from my mother, I began growing out my hair. It took several years of bad hair looks (as evidenced by class photos from the era), but by about 10th grade I finally had hair long enough to call “long”. My mother hated it, told me derisively that I looked like Joan Baez. I don’t know what was wrong with that.

Then came “care”. I washed it on Sundays and Thursdays and learned to wrap it around my head, clip it and sit under the bonnet blow dryer all evening to get it straight and dry, as all girls did in the day. This was before hand-held blow dryers. My ritual could not be altered. My high school senior photo shows long hair, parted in the middle: perfection.

It stayed that way all through college, though by this time I did have a hand-held dryer. I would hang my head upside down to dry my increasingly long hair. It took a long time to dry my thick, long, dark hair, but was worth it. Senior year, my boyfriend and I bought a black and white TV for my dorm room and I would have the old Jeopardy day-time TV program on with host Art Fleming and Don Pardo as I hung my head upside down blowing my hair dry. But I never got to watch Final Jeopardy, as I had to leave for class.

I married right after graduation. Dan and I each put in $50 to buy that TV, so we had joint property. It felt like a reason to continue. Three months later, having started my first job and tired of constantly being carded in bars and liquor stores, I chopped off my lovely hair.

No Way Out

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Our crowning…glory?

What teen/young adult/ more mature adult/even more mature adult hasn’t graded a day by whether it’s a Good Hair Day or a Bad Hair Day? Said grade has a significant effect on willingness to leave the house. How many untold hours have been spent attempting to coerce the dread BHD into a GHD? Taken cumulatively, this has probably affected the nation’s GDP in no small way.

My particular battle centered on super curly/frizzy hair in super cool California in the 60s with surfer girl hair the golden icon. Beach parties were a disaster. The semester of daily swimming for PE was a disaster. Sleeping on brush rollers created a fix until about noon, when the elements took over.

Finally, in junior year, I had my shoulder length hair straightened. Oh glory – I was finally like all the other girls! Then I had it straightened again and the universe told me what it thought about my denial of my true self: half my hair broke off at the roots and fell out. When I was Sixteen. Does it get any worse? Of course there would be no trimming of the tresses to even things out a bit. I just kept the very thin long part and watched as the broken hairs grew back in as a crewcut. I must have been the only girl (or boy) in school sporting two hairdos at the same time.

The hair wars never end, but there was, eventually, a valuable lesson learned by a sixteen year old girl who was uncomfortable with, and attempted to transform, her presentation to the world.