Reminiscing: Hair Hype

  

It began one evening in 1957, right before picture day in third grade.  The straight, Dutch Boy bangs and bob that had been my hairdo for as long as I could remember took a back seat.  

I was ushered into Mother’s bedroom to sit on a padded stool before her wooden dressing table, a small, tentative little girl in a grown-up spot.  The table was special with an element of fantasy: it had special “secret” drawers with two cut-glass knobs each.  The table’s lace-runner-covered surface displayed a lavender ceramic pot filled with loose face powder and a puff, a couple of small jars of barely-pink nail polish, a metal nail file, several gold tubes of super-red lipstick…and a brand new bag of pink Spoolies.

In the small rectangular mirror hanging behind the table I watched Mother wind strands of my dampened dishwater-blonde hair around those Spoolies: rubber spools (curlers) with flexible ends that collapsed to form little pointed mounds resembling fortune cookies.  These, I learned later, were supposed to snap close to my scalp, but mine dangled freely on all sides about an inch from my head, even across my forehead. When I lay on my pillow they felt like knobby rocks come alive, rolling beneath my head with each movement.  

I didn’t care one iota about having curly hair before that day.  In fact, my hair had always been fine.  And yet this Spoolie initiation marked the beginning of decades (sad to say) of dissatisfaction and hair manipulation.  

In fourth grade I heard, “Your hair is so straight, like a stick! Wouldn’t you like to have permanently curly hair?” I didn’t know the right answer, but I agreed - sure - because I wanted most of all to be a good girl and not disagreeable.

So Mother took me to visit her hairdresser, a businesslike woman with a stern face who lived in the country and worked out of a small, darkly lit parlor in her garage. There I faced the most repulsive stuff on earth (perm solution) for the first time.  It was disgusting.  I held my breath as much as possible while my heart pounded wildly, a frantic prisoner to toxic odors.  If only I could break free of the plastic apron around my neck and run like mad for fresh air!  I left the smelly parlor that day feeling different, as if I’d passed through a rite of initiation.  For sure my hair had been altered.  It was frizzy rather than curly, and the ends were still straight, but in an unnatural way.  I thought it ugly because, well, it was.

From then on, fads changed, but curly hair was still in vogue so I did my best to keep up.  Curling techniques were uncomfortable, always a matter of sleeping on some sort of appliance. Sponge-rollers looked friendly enough: pretty little soft, pink tubes that could be wound with hair and clamped in place with stiff plastic arms during the night.  Unfortunately those arms might poke your head, and maybe one would come undone while you slept.  In that case, you’d be greeted in the morning with a strand of straight hair in the midst of waves or ringlets or both, depending on the effectiveness of the rollers.

These foam rollers were followed by the hair-terrorists of the 60’s: brush rollers.  Stiff-bristled brushes (think rigid bottle brushes) filled hard plastic cylinders to protrude from open spaces and grab wrapped-around hair – then were held in place with long plastic picks.  Reclining your head on this prickly mess was like trying to rest on a tumorous porcupine in high alert.  Sometimes the bristles and picks left sores that formed scabs.

To keep my faux-curled, ratted hairdo in place during high school years, I applied an entire can of aerosol Aqua Net hairspray every week. This involved spraying several thick layers on my hair every morning, with drying time in-between, while standing before a 3-way mirror in a tiny half-bathroom with no ventilation.  Sometimes I thought I would gag - but it was all for the sake of acceptable hair, so it was okay. Any lung casualties were collateral, and all for a good cause.

From that point I went through a phase of leaving my stick-straight hair in a long ponytail gathered at the base of my neck, or piling it on top of my head (sometimes with the addition of a fake hairpiece) when I dressed up.  This was probably the most sane hair-era to date, despite pesky internal doubts suggesting I should be doing something else, something curly.

Eventually, as a mother of four children, I decided I should grow up, leave the college hairdo behind, and look the part – so I ditched the ponytail for a new cut and frequent perms from my hairdresser friend, Betty.  She cheerfully tinkered with my hair in her kitchen, charged me half price, and used double-strength perm solution that she left on twice as long as recommended.  My skin burned from the chemical overdose, but my hair was curly.  Not attractive necessarily, but curly.

A curling iron and hairspray (less quantity than before, thankfully) carried me through many years, right up to my 50’s in fact, when I finally got wise and reverted back to a shorter modification of my original straight hairdo before Spoolies invaded my life: a do-less hairdo with bangs.  Fifteen years ago I finally gave my hair permission to do what it wanted rather than what I wanted, and I love it! I even have become my own hairdresser, giving myself haircuts every 6 weeks or so.  That with frequent washings is all I need.

Moral to the story: Sometimes it takes a lifetime to figure out authentic is best.

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P.S. Believe it or not, Spoolies are back – “a retro favorite with a modern twist”: http://www.spoolies.com