I got my hair colored and cut yesterday. I called too late to get an appointment with my regular stylist, so I had to rely on my emergency backup stylist. The emergency backup stylist has now cut my hair twice, and I think she’s done a better job than the regular one, which puts me in a quandary, since they work in the same salon. How uncomfortable would it be for me to switch? Should I just start scheduling appointments with the new one, and hope the old one forgets about me? Should I call the old one and explain, regretfully, that my schedule can no longer accommodate her daytime hours? Or there’s the path of least resistance: put up with substandard haircuts.

The whole hair styling experience is fraught with tension, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know what rankles more: the exorbitant fee (representing a whole month’s rent, not so long ago); the ridiculous tip (which I’m afraid to reduce, because she’s CUTTING MY HAIR! She could ruin me!); or the two tedious hours a month it takes to get it done.

Or maybe it’s the monthly explanation to Husband of why a bottle of Miss Clairol and a trim in front of the bathroom mirror wouldn’t do just as well. “It’s not like you’re doing anything that…dramatic,” Husband opined.

Dramatic, no, but, as everyone knows, comedy’s harder than drama. I have comedic hair. I have a vast forehead, a widow’s peak, and cowlicks that resist bangs. On a very dry day, with proper application of hairstyling products and devices, these flaws can be camouflaged with artful styling, and my hair even looks shiny, healthy, and full of body, but under any other conditions my coiffure shows itself for the frizzy, wiry, forehead-baring mess that it is.

The thing I hate most about my hair is that it’s not rise-and-go. Most people wake up with their hair plastered to their heads. It’s not a great look, but run a comb through it and it’ll do. When I wake up, my hair is puffed up and wired into whatever bed-wrinkled position I slept in, and only a wash, blow-dry and style will get it to go back down again. This is a difficult state of affairs for a mom. I can’t just run Aitch out to preschool or even take him to the playground without a shower, or a hat.

When I joined the Peace Corps, my biggest worry was not about the language or job or culture, but what my hair was going to look like if I didn’t have reliable access to hot water and electricity so I could beat it into submission each day. For several years I let my hair run wild: no haircuts (couldn’t afford them!), limited washing, and mostly air-drying. The other volunteers were doing the same. It was very freeing, if not very attractive. Straight hair got straighter and limper; frizzy hair got larger and curlier. The other southern-European frizzy-haired ethnic types and I were known as “The Big Hair Club.” At the risk of turning this blog into a Peace Corps retrospective, I submit a photo from those days:



In retrospect, I think the camel may have been balking because he was frightened by the looming shadow of my enormous hair.