“I luuuv your hair,” my daughter’s friend says to me. “You’re so lucky to have so much of it. And the color and natural highlights! Just luscious.”
Luscious? First of all, who calls an over-50-year-old’s hair, luscious? Only another woman, of course, and at 30-something, a rather naïve woman.
(I note, by the way, that her hair is teenage blonde, straight and long, pulled into a perky ponytail as she shuttles her kids form soccer to ballet to gymnastics.)
But I digress. Continue reading
I’m trying to think of a body part that I like. We women are always told that we’re too critical of our bodies, and in theory, I agree. Each of us is formed the same, and yet so differently. We have the trunk, two legs, two arms, two hands with five fingers on each. Two feet and ten toes, and then, of course, there’s the head.
Aha! I just thought of the body part I like.
Continue reading
I’ve never had a bad hair day.
I’ve had a bad hair month, of course, and even a bad hair year.
My first bad hair year occurred when the new hairdresser ignored my plea to “only cut the split ends.” But you know that sound.
Snip. “Oops.”
Snip. “Oops again! Better even it up.”
My college long-haired look.
I was a freshman in college in Virginia, where everyone talked in a slow drawl, and the hairstylists in the beauty salons all wore teased hair and cherry red lipstick. I walked in the shop, a tiny ‘Steel Magnolias’ kind of place attached to the owner’s home; I sported a long brunette mane that almost reached the middle of my back.“Just a trim,” I said. “Boyfriend’s coming for the college harvest dance.”
I left the place with curly hair cropped at the bottom of my earlobe. Actually, looking at photos of it now, the haircut suited me.
But my boyfriend didn’t think so, and he tagged after my long-haired blonde roommate all weekend long.
Now, I’m smarter (and older – no long hair anymore). When I find a hairstylist I like, I stay with her, year after year after year. She becomes a member of the family, so to speak. She knows to not even approach my hair with mousse or spray or anything sticky and smelly. She knows to only cut a ‘fraction’ each time (if she really followed those directions, my hair would be reaching my rump by now). She doesn’t panic when she hears me breathing out, breathing in, loudly, with each snip.
But my man is the most nervous one during my every-6-week-salon trips.
“AGAIN?” he asks. He hates my hair when I return from the hair salon. No matter how diligent the hair stylist is, she can’t recreate the way I dry and style my hair (which includes closing my eyes, waving the blow dryer around my head for 7.5 minutes, scrunching my curls, then leaving for work)
News Anchor Hair
So when I return from my hair appointment yesterday, my man claims I look like a newscaster, hair straight and bouncy, falling in place just right.
In short, not “me.”
Then he wonders out loud with hope in his heart: “Are you washing your hair tonight?”
Every woman knows one of the great things about getting her hair done is NOT having to wash it for a day, or two, or three.
So I ignore him, but here’s me first thing this morning.
Straight and fluffy, not “me.”
Yes, I’m heading for the shower now.
roughwighting 