Good Hair Day

I finally (after being here how many months?) found a hair stylist I like! She said herself that she's the best in town and I have to say I agree. Not too expensive either, which was a relief, since it means I can keep going back to her.

Which I will do, because for the first time in months I like my hair! I feel so pretty and confident.

There's just nothing like a bad haircut to make you feel horrible, is there? I learned that when I was 12, with my first perm.

Up to then my hair was uncut, because of my father's fondness for having his little girl in pigtails. Which means it was probably Mom who decided I needed a more adult style, although it's hard to imagine her crossing Dad at all back then.

However it happened I wound up at a salon, describing to the stylist what I wanted my hair to look like. The newest style is what I wanted, the one all the other girls in junior high were wearing. Since we didn't have TV I'd never heard of Farah Fawcett or feathering, though, which led to the miscommunication. I was trying to describe fluffy feathering around my face and use the word "curl." So the stylist (and looking back she must have been rather young herself to have made this mistake) gave me curls - tight poodle curls all over my head.

I went home and sobbed. Mom talked about washing the perm out before it set. Dad blew up and insisted we call the salon and complain.

Mom and I didn't want to. (We'd been taught very well to simply accept bad things and not invite disaster by complaining about them.) Finally, Dad talked Mom into calling. She returned with the announcement that they had apologized and were fixing it for free the next day.

I was terrified to return, embarrassed to see my stylist and afraid of how she'd react. And sure enough, she was there. She looked like she'd been crying too, though, and gave me a stilted apology, part "I'm sorry," part "How could you get me in trouble like this?" I tried to avoid looking at her as I mumbled an apology for being so stupid as to let her give me a bad style.

Then my new stylist came up, and everything got better very quickly. This woman was a mother of teenagers, and told me she understood exactly how I wanted to look. She waved scissors around my head, dumped gunk over my hair, and kept me laughing as she talked with me. When she was done, I was beautiful.

This time I went home laughing, shaking my hair around as I adjusted to the loss of the weight I'd been carrying on my head. My parents were astonished at the change in their morose pre-teen. It was actually a few days before I went back to being depressed, angry and hormonal.

My dad spent the rest of my teen years trying to talk me into getting my hair set weekly. (I refused because I thought that was much too old lady.)

Yeah, there's nothing like a good style to make you feel good.