The Things We Do for Hair

I'm moving on to Sally today.  Kelly has done her last hair job.  She retired last week, and Sally has taken on several of Kelly's clients, including me.  

Over my lifetime, I've had very few hairdressers, mainly Joyce and Kelly AND my mother.  My mother did my hair when I was a little girl.  

And, as I think back on it, the preparation period resulting from Mother's at-home styling salon looked slightly similar to what Kelly has been doing for the past year and Joyce before her. 

Kelly taught Joyce how to pull those bunches of hair,  load 'em on paper strips, dab 'em with sauce from the back room and tack 'em to my head. 

Once completed, the head looked somewhat like a series of white collapsed dominos until a timer went off.

Before learning Kelly's method, Joyce used a crochet needle (some sharper than others) and a plastic bag, pulling strips of hair through holes in the bag.

Then, she'd administer the sauce, go feed peanuts to the Hair Hut squirrels and come back at the appointed time to wash off the sauce and trim my hair. 

Back when Mother was my hairdresser, I'm thinking it may not have been such an amiable scene as my trips to the Hair Hut and (later) Hair Tenders, cuz I probably didn't walk willingly to that chair to "chat" with Mother while she worked on my head---with intensity.

She used ripped-up pieces of sheets, wrapping them around several strands of my long hair----tightly too.  Her motive was to achieve the "cute ringlet" effect.  

Sorta like Nellie Olson on "Little House . . . ." 

Had I known about obnoxious Nellie Olson at the time, I'm sure my willingness to come and sit in that chair and submit to those sheets would have been substantially less enthusiastic as it already was. 

After each North Boyer salon session, I slept in both my bed sheets and my head sheets.  The bed sheets were much more comfortable.  The head sheets kept me tossing and turning all night in search of elusive comfort.  

By morning, my scalp felt as if it had been stretched to the max, very tender indeed.  Before school, I'd march back to the chair on command from our family sergeant. 

Mother would rip out the sheets, maybe trying not to rip out the hair with them and carefully, with a comb, she'd organize those long ringlets cascading from the top of my head.

She'd send me off to school, so pleased and proud of the effect.  Each afternoon, I'd come home from school with hair looking like a tornado hit it and ruffles from my "pretty little dress" trailing behind.  

I think she finally gave up and let my hair do its natural thing.  Its natural thing for the next several years was interrupted only by occasional snipping with scissors.  

Yeah, like all other female classmates in junior high and high school, I went through the "duck tail" craze.  Of course, we liked to live a little dangerously and whisper to our friends that we really had "DA's" aka "Duck's Asses."

I still look at those class pictures and wonder what we liked about that style, or if we even did. At least, we all looked pretty much alike, and that was important at that age.  

Guess it was also better than mullets, which I don't think I ever wore, consciously, at least. 

I also remember sleepless nights during high school and college, wearing the cruelest hairdo helpers known to women.  I don't think I ever saw a man wearing those gawd-awful plastic rollers---the bigger the better.  

Again, in the morning,  with the tenderest of scalps, we'd pull the rollers out, rat our hair with a brush for the "big" look and empty a can of hair spray on the end result, hoping to cement it into place.  

That didn't work well when I moved on to Moscow and the University of Idaho where the wind blew relentlessly.  All the hair spray in the world could not control what the wind blew out of control. 

After I returned home to teaching, one of my students (I believe she's now known as Farmin teacher Lisa Greene) showed me a new way to sleep at night and still put some sense of control into my hair. 

The hair-spray rage had gone by the wayside, but a naturally curly head of hair needs some sense of direction.  

The procedure called for taking strands of hair, wrapping them around the scalp and pinning them down with much far less sadistic hair clamps than what we had been accustomed to using.  

Finally, I could sleep and have good hair in the morning.

Over the years since, I've done braids, pony tails and a few short-hair looks.  And over the years since my sister Laurie said, "Marianne, it's time," I've had the zap.  

That means highlighting a head of hair---that wants to turn gray---with a dash of color resembling the old auburn look of the first 45 or so years.

Regardless of the scary preparation look in the salon chair, my hairdressers have done a great job adding a touch of youth to the mop surrounding this wrinkled old face.  

It will be interesting to see what Sally's strategy is; although I do know that Kelly left "the formula" for Marianne's zap in a drawer before walking out for the last time.

In the meantime, during my almost 64 years here on Earth, I've observed that my mother has remained pretty constant in her personal hair strategies---'cept for maybe the wig years.  

I don't know how she sleeps at night with those old-time (probably at least 75-year-old) metal curlers.

Nonetheless, she's still wrapping her locks inside them every night before beddy-bye time, and her hair still looks pretty darned good. 

Maybe, over the years,  her skull formed calluses like musicians' fingers do for guitar strings cuz she never complains about her curlers keeping her awake at night.