Prompt #
44 - Hairstyles
Hair has
been the bane of my existence.
At
first, it was white blond, like both my brothers, and we all turn
mousy brown by the time we start school. This picture of me and the
older of my two brothers is a hand-painted photograph, from the days
before colour film.
I read
somewhere that the popularity of blond bleach is a subconscious
desire to return to pre-school innocence, or women giving in to men's
desire for prepubescent pre-verbal females. Or maybe it's just a wish
for Scandinavian roots (in more ways than one).
The
first day I walked into a high school classroom to teach my first
year, in an Icelandic-Canadian community in rural Manitoba, I was
faced with a room full of blond heads. This immediately put me into
the scene in The Village of the Damned where a classroom of
blond-headed clone-like children with telepathic skills stared down a
teacher, Hayley Mills' father, who built up a brick wall in his head
to block the children from reading his mind, from detecting the bomb
he has hidden in his briefcase, a kamikaze mission to rid the world
of alien invaders. A piece of chalk whizzing past my ear and smashing
on the blackboard behind me broke the spell.
My hair
is light brown, now with white at the temples. I've never ever had it
permed or dyed, although I've added a reddish rinse twice. It is
naturally very thick and wavy, and it is super-sensitive to humidity,
so at summer dances, although it may have entered the dancehall wavy
and smooth, before the end of the evening it was a ball of friz.
Once I
found a hairdresser in Winnipeg who had a poster that said Friz Is
In, but my only response was “I wish!”
The best
thing that ever happened to my hair was the invention of the
blow-dryer. I use the brush attachment and it dries and straightens
both at once. A good cut also helps. I like a bob with the bottom cut
straight. If it is layered, each layer curls up separately. Friz
again. Maybe this is just evidence that we always want what we don't
have. Or, like Jane Fonda's character learns in Coming Home, natural
is best, and being able to accept our hair is the first step in being
able to accept our true selves. Maybe, although she did discover this
universal wisdom in a beauty salon.
For my
Twitter photo I use a selfie of me in a plastic Halloween wig. More
wishful thinking, as real bangs too are out for me. They curl up into
little fly-away wings which look like owl or devil horns.
The
nicest thing anyone has ever said about my hair was when my
grandfather, missing his late wife, said: You have your grandmother's
hair.
