Thursday, July 3, 2008

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

I have issues. Hair issues. Not right now. Right now, I feel like my hair looks fabulous, thanks to my wonderful and slightly nutty hairdresser Rina (Melissa, I love you girl, I do, but I don’t live in Michigan any more and I had to find someone else. I’m sorry. Oh, also, I don’t even think Melissa reads my blog, but I just had to throw that out there. OK. ).

So anyway as I was saying. I used to sometimes maybe have some tee-tiny minor hair issues. I believe I have traced it back to my childhood, and a very specific event that occured.

Oh yes, friends. That is exactly what you are looking at it and thinking it is. That is me, at the tender age of 1, in a wig. Uh huh. See, in my family, it was a really HEEEELARIOUS tradition to put my grandmother’s wig on all the babies and take pictures. Apparently they thought it would be funny. Later in life. You know. To show future boyfriends and stuff. "Hey look, here’s a picture of her in a wig. Ahahahahaha." What they didn’t realize was that this single incident planted in me, somewhere deep deep down inside, a disease that would not die for nearly 30 years. We call this disease: Bad Hair.


Here I am last night. Er, uh, I mean, at my second birthday party. Sorry, I thought it was last night because I’m shoveling cake in my mouth like it’s going out of style. Which is NOT something I did last night. Sorry for the confusion. That is my grandmother’s hand there about the snatch the plate away from me. Hold it, Granny! I ain't done yet. So here I am on my 2nd birthday. As you can see I’m wearing a bonnet. Seriously Mom? A freaking bonnet? I mean I know it was the 70’s and all, but a BONNET???? And in case you can’t tell from the picture, my bangs pretty much started in the back of my head. In fact, I think I was all bangs. There was no hair behind that bonnet. Just bangs.

Ok, maybe I lied. Maybe there was hair behind that bonnet. And maybe that hair was a baby mullet. And maybe I am ashamed of that. But at least I wasn’t sporting some Princess Leia bun-tails AUNT MARLIE. Yeah, I just called you out on my blog. How ya like me now?

Oh this is a gem. I actually think I look a little crazy in this picture. And I mean that in a good way. Like I hope my kid looks like that. Because I love the way I look in this picture. Mischevious. Sneaky. Sly. Watch out! But that hat isn’t much better than the bonnet. But at least it goes with the nightgown in a very Laura Ingalls Wilder kind of way.

A personal favorite of mine. Whoever got me up that morning couldn't be bothered to comb my hair. Look at the smirk on my face. I was a little wise cracker even at the age of 4. And I will tell you what. 26 years later and I still Enjoy Coke.

Why, I do believe we’ve come to the “Self Haircut” portion of my childhood photographs. Everyone has one of these. Every kid, at one point or another, gets a hold of the scissors and gives themselves a little trim. Have you ever noticed that like 90% of the time it happens RIGHT BEFORE picture taking time? It’s like we have a sixth sense about that as children. Also, I think my mom did the whole pony tail thing to detract attention from my ridiculously adult sized ears that I was sporting here at 5 years old.
June 1986. Toronto, Canada. Jelly shoes. Socks. Shorts that clearly ride up so high, that even as we pose for this picture I am trying to pull them out of my crotch. A Dorothy Hamill do. Let me just pause here and say that for the official record, I LOVED THIS OUTFIT. I thought it was the bomb diggity the way it all matched. Those shorts? I didn’t care that they were sateen and rode up every crack and crevice. Those shoes? No way was I going to get sweaty jelly foot. You know what I’m talking about. Sweaty Jelly Foot. It’s an official foot disorder. I wore mine with socks to prevent it from setting in.

(Do people still say bomb diggity? Am I way behind on this? Is there a more current phrase that I should be misusing? Someone please let me know.)

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? About me wearing a lot of shorts that rode up back in the day? Yes, those were shorts. I loved them. I wore them every chance I got. Seriously. Ask my friend Sarah. She will tell you. But let’s focus on the hair. I used to pray to God that I would wake up and be like DJ Tanner. I would live with Uncle Jesse and Joey, I would have a cute little baby sister who said such witty things as "You got it dude" and I would have the most magical mall hair ever. I was not given good mall hair. My hair is fine. There’s a lot of it, but it doesn’t hold a curl to save my life and it’s as straight as a pin. Do you see my sad, pathetic attempt at mall hair here? If you look closely, you can see it. That is all my hair would do, and I assure you I used plenty of White Rain to try and make it higher. The only blessing I can count is that I was born late enough that I only caught the very tail end of mall hair. By the time I was in high school, mall hair was out.

And this is what was in. I don't even know what to say about this except that I think even I realized at the time that my hair didn't look good. I can remember going to my hairdresser and asking for bangs and telling her in no uncertain terms that I only wanted "a few bangs". I ended up with this mess. Thems bangs started WAY back in my head. There was nothing "few" about them. They were huge. And thick. And this was durring my dye-my-hair-really-really-really-really-dark-brown phase. This backfired once and I ended up with black, nearly purple, hair. I don't have a picture of that. Not this time. Maybe some other time.

Ah Prom Hair. Everyone's had it. It's not such a big deal. Check out that dress, though. I loved it. I got it from Winkelman's. I think it was a size two. Pardon me while I go shoot myself.
Our last entry in this edition of Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow, comes to us from the year 2000. It was around this time I thought it would be a good idea to chop all my hair off and dye it bright red. I didn't realize then, as I do now, that I have a very large and rather unusually shaped head. Cutting all your hair off and dying it an unnatural color will emphasize that. You know what else happens when you cut all your hair off and dye it an unnatural color? It takes a really really REALLY long time to grow it back out. Painfully long. (PS, Hi Wonder. Why do we look like lesbians in this picture? Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that we're not. Lesbians. You know.)
I know that there are many, many more pictures out there of my Bad Hair Disease. Some highlights that I did not cover today: the blonde wig, the Sun-In summers and perm that followed, the Roller-Brush Incident of 95. You can be sure those pictures are staying under wraps.

2 comments:

Caps said...

Funny you should say that. People told me that a LOT when I did that to my hair.

Anonymous said...

Oh my gosh...the hair rolling incident. I believe we made a special trip to Meijer after seeing a "Wash and Curl" commercial on TV. That name is very misleading. I wonder if it got pulled for false advertising. I remember thinking that we would wash our hair with this magic shampoo and it would be curly. You know it was the 90's when we WANTED curly hair.

This is Andrea in case you didn't figure it out. I can't remember my password so I am going to be Anonymous.