Big, Fat, HAIRY Deal:

I got a perm yesterday. Now I recognize that perms are passé. But when you have baby-fine, poker straight hair (like mine) that won’t hold a set if you pay it cash {or in this case, very expensive styling products}; you’ll pretty much do whatever it takes.

It seems like I have been struggling with my hair for as long as I can remember. When I was a very little girl, I used to spend part of every Saturday night sitting on the living room floor watching Lawrence Welk while my mother rolled my hair up on flannel rag strips to get me ready for Sunday school the next day.

From those, I graduated to “Spoolies”. Are any of you old enough to remember those? Spoolies were pink rubber rollers. When they were wound up and snapped together, the resembled a hundred little Martian space craft orbiting my head. Rags were softer to sleep on…………….. but "SPOOLIES" were COOL!



When I was about 4, Mom suggested that it was probably time to get my first hair cut. I was pretty excited about it, too. But my older brothers were against the whole thing. One of them (who shall remain nameless here to protect the guilty) tried as hard as he could to talk me out of it, but I was determined. Mom said that I sat there looking more like I was occupying the electric chair, than the seat of honor in a beauty salon. As they made the initial cut, I broke into a huge smile and said, “Why that doesn’t hurt a bit!” Apparently, big brother had told me “Honey, you don’t want to get your hair cut. You know how much it hurts when you cut your finger? Well there is so much hair, it’ll be even worse than that.” And I believed him and still wanted to be beautiful badly enough to face the pain.

Maybe it was my determination to look pretty that swayed her, but Mom went all out that day and shelled out a hard-earned $8 to have it styled as well. On the way home we stopped to show Aunt Roberta – not home, Aunt Greta – not home, and Aunt Louise – also not home. So Mom sat me on the top step to look pretty for Daddy when he got back from work. Unfortunately, before he could arrive and see me in all my glory, big brother had turned the hose on me. So much for glamour!

By 1st grade my hair was long again and worn in braids, which I apparently had a hard time keeping out of my mouth. Momma told me if I didn’t stop chewing on my pigtails, she would cut them off. My Momma was not big on idle threats. By 2nd grade I was back to a short cut.

Recently I told a couple of my brothers that I distinctly remember Mom telling me that she was sorry that I looked so ugly, but that she only knew how to do “boy hair”. They disputed this, saying Mother would NEVER, EVER have said I looked ugly. They are probably right. (Mom was an encourager, never one to put anyone down.) She probably said that my hair style looked “unfortunate” or that she was sorry it turned out “like that”. But what my heart heard was “ugly”.

This is the tip of the hair style night mare, iceberg. There was the “trim” Mom gave my very long hair while I was practicing the piano. “No, I didn’t need to stop. Keep playing.” I must have been a high energy piano player, because the hair kept getting shorter and shorter and crooked-er and crooked-er, until she had to take me to someone to “fix the damage”. That ended up as a pixie cut.

Or the 1st haircut of my teenage years, where my sister-in-law misjudged the distance and gave me ½ way up the forehead bangs.

There was the time I got a perm the day before I was a bride’s maid at my cousin’s wedding and they forgot to put on the neutralizer – effectively giving me a “permanent straight” instead of a “permanent wave”.

All things considered, my hair and I have not ever been best friends, but it’s a relationship I’m willing to keep working on. After all, the alternative is not a pertty picture. And the perm is actually not bad at all…..