Prompt # 44 - Hairstyles

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.