Our crowning…glory?

What teen/young adult/ more mature adult/even more mature adult hasn’t graded a day by whether it’s a Good Hair Day or a Bad Hair Day? Said grade has a significant effect on willingness to leave the house. How many untold hours have been spent attempting to coerce the dread BHD into a GHD? Taken cumulatively, this has probably affected the nation’s GDP in no small way.

My particular battle centered on super curly/frizzy hair in super cool California in the 60s with surfer girl hair the golden icon. Beach parties were a disaster. The semester of daily swimming for PE was a disaster. Sleeping on brush rollers created a fix until about noon, when the elements took over.

Finally, in junior year, I had my shoulder length hair straightened. Oh glory – I was finally like all the other girls! Then I had it straightened again and the universe told me what it thought about my denial of my true self: half my hair broke off at the roots and fell out. When I was Sixteen. Does it get any worse? Of course there would be no trimming of the tresses to even things out a bit. I just kept the very thin long part and watched as the broken hairs grew back in as a crewcut. I must have been the only girl (or boy) in school sporting two hairdos at the same time.

The hair wars never end, but there was, eventually, a valuable lesson learned by a sixteen year old girl who was uncomfortable with, and attempted to transform, her presentation to the world.