Me, My Hair, and I (14 page)

Unlike a perm, teasing is temporary. So I can switch from casual carpooling-mom hair to big hair as needed. My do is a tad retro. But it works for me. Better than beta-blockers or Botox, having my hair curled and teased lets fiftyish me feel a little onstage oomph.

“Hair, makeup, wardrobe,” a long-ago TV ad mused. “Where would an actress be without them?” Or an actress at heart, like me? All my life, I have taken on different personae with different hairdos. My mother is the opposite. After cutting her long hair to begin her working life in her early twenties, Mom has basically stuck with the same short, bouncy haircut and the same Loving Care hair color, on into her eighties.

She will never be ready, she's decided, to go gray. But she was up for a relatively late-in-life career change. In her fifties, she shifted from teaching science to earning a new degree and taking a new job as a children's librarian. Another quiet profession, but one in which she could act out her own love of theater by reading aloud to kids, energetically voicing the different roles. Yet “Mrs. Searle” always looked reassuringly the same to her young students—as she does to me, still, when I visit her in sunny Arizona. She moves less briskly now, but she has the same level, blue-eyed gaze and same game, lipsticked smile. Mom, with her Jackie O. sunglasses and her short Audrey Hepburn hair, always the same warm shade of brown. I'm the one who's changing my hair color as I age, opting for lighter highlights to soften my face.

I see now that for me, hair has always been a performance art. In the newest version of my
Tonya & Nancy:
Th
e Rock Opera
script, still evolving after two professional productions, I added a line awarding Nancy Kerrigan “ Best performance by a ponytail.” Even for those of us living far from the Olympic-size world stage, our hair is a kind of performance we give throughout our lives.

“I Like It Different”

Nowadays, in my early fifties, I am happily schizo with my hair: keeping “acoustic” in my day-to-day housekeeping and teaching life, with my shoulder-length hair hanging loose, but changing things up to my more “electric” style when I need to be “on.”

“Everything comes and goes,” Joni Mitchell sings, “marked by lovers and styles of clothes.” And, I'd add, by styles of hair too.

Hillary Clinton, famous for her shifting hairstyles, has said wryly that over the years she has grown not only older and wiser but “blonder.” Like Hillary, I have found mixing in golden-brown streaks to mask the scattered white in my still-brown hair helps brighten my midlife look and outlook, like Christmas lights in midwinter.

Everything does indeed come and go. Styles change as quickly these days as the ever-shifting celebrities who set off one hair craze after another, while rising and falling with Internet-powered speed themselves.

Still, we each primp hopefully for our own little star-turns. My mother at age eighty-four still treats her hair with Loving Care. New hairstyles give me a boost when life gets a bit blah, whether from the pressures of motherhood or middle-aged angst, or worries over what lies beyond. Luckily, I have little time lately to fret over my advancing age.

Mixing it up with youthful high-energy theater folk is one way to stay young at heart. Recently in New York City, in the spring of 2013, I slipped into the ladies' room of a music studio where our rock opera was being performed as a staged reading showcase. The ladies' room was still redolent with the heavy-duty hairspray of the actresses, some of them Broadway pros. I pulled out my own purse-size bottle of hairspray, breathing deeply to calm my nerves. And I felt, as I inhaled their spray with mine, a sense of sisterhood with these starlets.

Like them, in my own smaller way, I primped as if I were suiting up in battle armor. A few well-aimed spritzes of spray made my hair, and my spirits, rise. Head and hair high, I opened the door to face my audience.

Remembering Sandra Dee

HALLIE EPHRON

I
t's 1958 and I'm ten years old, a skinny kid, all elbows and knees, a long face with big eyes under furry caterpillar eyebrows, sitting on a stack of telephone books in the chair at Mr. Latour's Beauty Salon, where my mother gets her hair done once a week. I've come here often with her, but this is the first time Mr. Latour is cutting my hair.

Everything in the salon is pink or gray, including Mr. Latour, who has thick gray curls that remind me of a French poodle. He's washed and cut and brushed my mother's short hair until it's a glistening tour de force, a virtual Christmas wreath of curls neatly encircling her head.

Now it's my turn.

I sit in the chair, my feet dangling off the ground, and stare at myself in the mirror. My hair is thick, jet black, and more or less straight. My mother appraises me with a sour look. She tells Mr. Latour that if he doesn't fix my hair, soon I'll start looking like Veronica Lake.

I don't know who Veronica Lake is, but I know from my mother's expression that this would not be a good thing. Later I learn that Lake is a sultry movie star, memorable more for the way she wore her silken tresses covering one eye than for her talent. Sultry isn't yet in my wheelhouse.

“Can you cut it like this?” I ask. I show Mr. Latour a picture of June Allyson that I've cut from a magazine. She's a fresh-faced blond with short, curly bangs and a perfect pageboy.

Mr. Latour makes a show of examining the picture. Then me. I squirm under his gaze. He and my mother trade smirks.

He wraps my neck with a strip of scratchy crepe paper, then snaps open a cloth and drapes it over me. Turns the chair so I can no longer see myself in the mirror. Then he picks up a shiny pair of scissors. The scissors feel cold against the side of my face.
Snick
. I shiver at the sound.

Snick
.
Snick
. With each sound, chunks of hair fall to the ground. When he stops, the speckled linoleum floor is covered with my hair. He makes a few last snips, then removes the cloth and the crepe paper and whisks errant hairs from the back of my neck. He turns the chair so I can see myself.

“Voilà,” he says.

June Allyson is not staring back at me. I've got bangs that look as if they've been chopped off with a paper cutter. The sides look hacked off too, and though one side obediently curls under, the other side flips up, giving me the dreaded Bozo the Clown look. I feel like I'm going to be sick.

“Much better,” my mother says in a chirpy voice as she applies fresh lipstick and fishes her car keys from her pocketbook.

It's a good thing no one asks me what I think, because if I try to say anything I'll burst into tears. All the way home I'm thinking, I hate my hair, I hate my hair, I hate my hair.

At home that night, I try to salvage the mess. Slowly, methodically, I take one strand of hair after another, wrap it around my finger, and anchor the curl in place with crisscrossed bobby pins. In the morning, I brush it out, trying to coax it smooth and turned under. Before I leave, in the mirror I catch the faintest glimmer of June Allyson.

I walk to school, holding my head high and steady so my hair won't get mussed. I imagine that I'm a model gliding down the runway. If I have to turn, it's point, pivot, turn. If I have to lean over, I bend at the knees.

By that afternoon, I've forgotten about being a model, along with my glamorous pageboy. As usual, after school I wheedle my way into a boys' softball game. As usual they stick me way out in right field.

The sun is shining, it's hot, and as I wait for the ball to come my way, I notice that my socks have scrunched down into my Mary Janes. The backs of my ankles are coated with dust from the playground's asphalt. I can see from my shadow that my pageboy has erupted on one side. I run my fingers through it, again and again, trying to coax it back under. Inevitably, it's at that moment that a fly ball with my name on it sails past.

A few years later, I bring Mr. Latour a picture of Sandra Dee. She's another wholesome, bright-eyed blond who stars in
Gidget
, the quintessential Malibu movie about a girl who gets herself a surfboard, shoulders her way into an all-boy surfer gang, earns their respect, and (of course) falls in love.

Sandra Dee's hair is a shorter version of June Allyson's, pumped full of air. There's a fancy French word for it:
bouffant
. But we call it the bubble.

By now I realize that Mr. Latour is more or less a one-trick pony, so I'm not surprised when I get the same haircut he always gives me. But I leave feeling optimistic because the movie magazine ran not only a picture of Sandra Dee's hair but also a detailed diagram with instructions for how to replicate it.

Pin curls won't do it. I've saved up my allowance and gotten myself a set of rollers at J. J. Newberry. Each inch-thick wire cylinder is stuffed with a prickly brush. Before going to bed, I set my hair, wrapping a strand of hair around each roller and running it through with a plastic anchor. A hairnet holds the rollers in place. Thus armored, somehow I manage to sleep. The only part of this that feels good is when I release those sausage curls the next morning and give my scalp a good scratch.

The trick to the bubble is teasing.
Tormenting
would be more apt, since this involves back-combing until all the hair on my head is standing up in tangles. Then it has to be smoothed and patted and shaped into one massive hair ball. Waves of hair spray turn the spun confection rigid.

My mother, who never has to set her hair and whose hair always looks exactly the same, barely looks up from her newspaper when I come down to breakfast with my new do. I realize that as long as my hair isn't hanging in my eyes, she's not going to notice.

A few months later, I modify the look after seeing
Last Year at Marienbad
, a French art film in which I believe nothing happens except Delphine Seyrig swans about in black and white, looking utterly fabulous with her pale skin and her black hair smoothed back in a sleek bouffant with a single curl tucked artfully around her ear.

It's that curl that captures my imagination. It's called a
guiche
—French for “spit curl.” While Ms. Seyrig may have used spit to keep hers in place, I use clear nail polish to glue mine to the side of my face.

I wear a bouffant with a
guiche
the same year I win an enormous plaque proclaiming me Sixth-Grade Girl Athlete of the Year. Sixth Grade's
Only
Girl Athlete is more accurate, because by now the boys won't let me into their pickup games and I've stopped asking. There's just one girl in my class who doesn't think it's weird that I still play ball after school on the playground. Sometimes she plays with me, but more often it's just me standing alone on the basketball court, working my way around the key.

With the ball balanced on my palm, I center myself and take aim, imagining the clean arc the ball will take before it whooshes through the hoop. And sometimes that's what happens. But I'm doomed if a stiff breeze kicks up and disturbs the hair mats that I lacquered that morning. It takes two hands to hold down my hair.

It never occurs to me that my obsession with my hair might be diminishing my athletic potential, so it's just as well that in seventh grade I give up sports completely. I also refuse to go back to Mr. Latour. Instead I tag along with my older sister and get my hair cut where she does. I keep trying to explain to hairdressers how I want them to cut my hair.

In the sixties, I want
Th
at Girl
Marlo Thomas's flip. (Big surprise, my hair will only flip on one side.) In the seventies, it's the figure skater Dorothy Hamill's swingy wedge. (My hair is too thick to swing.) A few years later, I want Farrah Fawcett's feathered do. (Turns out I don't have the patience for the amount of daily blow-drying that this requires.)

I achieve a modest success in the eighties when, trying to look like Jennifer Beals in
Flashdance
, I get a perm. I actually look a little bit like her character, Alex, whose spectacular break dancing earns her a scholarship to a dance conservatory. That year I even dress like her too, cutting the necks out of all my T-shirts and sweatshirts and wearing my sneakers with slouchy socks.

It's not until years later, around the time that my daughter starts obsessing over her hair (pouffy bangs, high ponytail in a colorful scrunchy), that I stop investing energy in mine. It starts to go gray and I let it. Now it's more salt than pepper, and I'm fine with that. I keep it short and uncomplicated. After a shampoo, I towel it dry, give it a tousle, and I'm good to go. There are no celebrity snapshots I can bring to my hairdresser to show how I want to look because there's not a single American movie star who looks even remotely like me.

Still, some things don't change. The hair on one side still refuses to turn under. My hairdresser, who's never heard of Bozo the Clown, says it's a cowlick and I should learn to love it. It's my hair's personality asserting itself, and after all these years it's not about to change.

When my daughter balks at going to my hairdresser—in tears, she tells me he makes her look like a monkey, and I know better than to say I think her hair looks cute—I tell her about Mr. Latour, who did a perfect job on my mother's hair and a perfectly awful job on mine. I tell her she doesn't have to go back to my hairdresser, ever, and I trot out old pictures of myself to show her the lengths to which I used to go to get my hair to behave.

My daughter is a terrific athlete. Sweeper on her soccer team. She anchored the 4×4 relay in track. She can even pole-vault. When I suggest she might have gotten her athletic ability from me, she does a double take.

I tell her about my Best Girl Athlete award and she gapes at a picture of me taken that year. I try to explain about Sandra Dee and Delphine Seyrig. She's unimpressed.

She tells me that the term for hair like mine in that picture is
choucroute
. While this lacks the elegance of
bouffant
or
guiche
, I have to admit she's right. I do look as if I've got a perfect mound of sauerkraut on my head.

“So what teams were you on?” she asks.

I explain that when I was her age, there were no sports for girls. No soccer. No track. All we had were physical education classes where we spent most of the time lining up by height and taking turns catching and throwing a ball. It was boys-only on the ball fields.

But still, I tell her that in elementary school I tried to be a player. A little baseball. A little basketball. And who knows, I might have gotten really good if I hadn't been so obsessed with my hair.