Hair Today. . . and Yesterday

        I’ve just had my first haircut since March – if you don’t count my sessions in the bathroom hacking blindly at the back edges.
After several years I finally tired of short hair and just let it grow through the spring, summer, and fall. You’d think I’d be able to sit on it at this point, but since when I began it was no longer than two inches, my greatest achievement is once again being able to put it up in a French-twisty sort of clip. Miraculously, my guy Albert just sort of shaped it a bit; he probably figured (accurately) that a woman who’s such a control freak that she’ll go 10 months in between cuts needs to be treated gently.

          It's shocking the amount of thought we expend on our hair. Mine exhibits Stepford-wife perfection in the winter and finger-in-the-light-socket waves and frizz in the summer. Imagine the hours and concentration I’ve wasted that could have been spent instead on mastering the oboe or discovering a cure for skin tags.

          This brought me to thoughts of my mother, who, with her limp, mousey brown hair, was as challenged as the rest of us.

I can still see her in the mirror at her dressing table. My mother was a  fairly modern mother of the 1950s in her brief shorts, martini in one hand, cigarette in the other.

Before the much later days of Mama's weekly trips to the hairdresser, organizing her hair happened at home. Cigarette on the ash tray next to her, she would sit and coil wispy brown strands into small circles and clamp each down with a shiny metal clip. This was a look seen only by those of us at home; my mother was never one of those women who buzzed off to the

grocery store with a head full of metal.

Later, she graduated to bristly curlers, but since she was less than expert with these, my older sister would stand in back of her, rolling and anchoring while I stood to the side, watching.

Either way, it was a lost cause. Mama's fine hair never stood a chance in the brutal humidity of Northern Virginia. After less than an hour of freedom, it would droop, or frizz, or flatten - or sometimes all three. 

 

There have been products that have changed the world and we can remember the before and after of their arrival - turning points like calculators, and answering machines, and even more ground-breaking, Tab. Incredible - a confection of sweetness with no calories.

Such was the impact of Aqua Net. We who had struggled with the armpit of humidity that is a southern summer could now mold our hair into the desired shape, spray the bejeezus out of it, and there it would stay, cowed and conquered. From this point forward, like so many other women her age, my mother would travel to her hairdresser's every Friday, have a wash and a nice chat and emerge with hair able to withstand a nuclear blast. Each new day for the next week, after judicious sleeping, strategic pokes with an Afro pick, and another layer of shellac, she could revive her hair into an approximation of Friday's "do." At the end of the week, she'd return to Hair Central and start the process all over again. 

Who knew that fifty years later, a presidential candidate would owe his extraordinary coiffure to a cousin of this same break-through product?