hair bonanza x2

i'm resurrecting one of my favorite posts since things in my brain have been too hectic to present new material. i posted it about a year ago, but i had about 150 fewer followers than i do now. i figure most of you haven't read it, so please read on & have a laugh at my expense. or be inspired to take your own trip down hair memory lane. i'd love to read yours!

ever since i was in second grade and my best friend amy got her hair cut to shoulder length & feathered, i've had a thing for hair. before that i remember having very few thoughts about hair other than that my mom pulled too hard when she was brushing & parting it to make me presentable. but ever since then, hair has been something i've been fairly creative with. i finally convinced my mom to let me get a hair cut to match amy's after months of begging. i went from this

to this.

a few years later, when i was 10, i got it cut really short in the back & got the top permed - because, well, because it was the 80's & my fabulous aunt joan had hers like that and i strove to be like her. i can't find any pictures that really showed the awesomeness of the style at the moment, but i did find one from that time period where i had some friends over & we decided to go all out punk, complete with hair, makeup & clothes. i think we were 11 here & we were channelling madonna and cindy lauper. i'm the one w/ the mirrored sunglasses & hearty socks.

along the line there were lots & lots of perms done in my grandma's kitchen because i wasn't cool enough to get the spiral perms of beauty shop lore.

i also went through many bottles of sun-in & lemon juice with peroxide applied to fried hair with a hair dryer. my parents were pretty conservative & didn't seem to understand my need to constantly cook, cut, dye, perm, and shave off my hair. they let me do some things, but had to draw the line somewhere & i guess sun-in was okay because orange & stalky was acceptable, but miss clairol was somehow over the line.

i did my time with the poofy bangs. my hair is really small & flat, but i was dedicated with the hair spray bottle and curling irons. here you see me, at 12, attempting to give the best sexy face i could manage.

i once went to camp for a week when i was 13 or 14 & came home with the back, bottom half of my head shaved totally bald. as if my hair wasn't small enough already, i had to go & decrease my volume by half. good plan there, sher! i actually found the clump of my hair a couple weeks ago when i was digging through boxes of relics in my parents attic. the guys who hacked off my hair for me were thoughtful enough to hold the end of my now-removed pony tail into some melted candle wax so i could save it as a summer memento. it also serves as a reminder of when i first went rogue w/ my hair. i'd decided i didn't need parental permission anymore for anything i wanted to do to my own head.

here's another shot of me trying to do big hair when i was about 16. it never lasted long, but the first half hour was generally ok before the flop kicked in. there wasn't enough rave hairspray in the world to keep this flat stuff in the air.

finally, straight hair came back into fashion & for a while there, i was in luck. i could stop perming it & just put some gentle curling iron coercion onto my bangs to prevent them from sticking to my greasy forehead & things went fairly well for a spell. here i was, my senior year of high school wearing a lovely ruffled denim shirt & having a pretty good hair day. that's my brother w/ the icky mustache in the back. i almost cropped him out, but i feel like it adds character to the picture. some gritty flavor, if you will.

and while we're at it, i need to add this picture of me in my golden corral uniform too. that hanky they made me wear on my head made me feel smokin hot. i liked working there because the sweet outfit helped me pick up guys. my claw-like hand, dirty keds and transparent apron look foxy here too.

then, right around the time of my 18th birthday, i had a break up that started a trend where i felt like i needed to make some physical change to myself when a relationship ended. this time, it was a big hair cut where i got my hair chopped into a very "mature" style. in other words, i had the hair of a 40 yr old woman. a couple months later, i was just about to head off to college & wasn't loving the hair, so i got a bright idea of how to fix it .... i permed it! and the next thing i knew, i was no longer a 40 yr old woman, i had become an octogenarian. i had the fluffy, short hair of my grandmother & i was only 18.

are you digging my huge, manly wool sweater? i think it offsets the granny hair. (btw, this is the same amy from my early childhood. we're still together after all these decades.)

whadaya know, the granny hair didn't prevent me from finding a boyfriend... even if he was shorter than me.

i got it trimmed a few months later to try to get rid of the granny that was lurking around my head, and i think that was probably a good thing, but as you can clearly see in this picture, my duck smile and velvet, poofy-sleeved, doilie collared monstrosity of a dress left something to be desired.

eventually that grew out. here's me in college dying it into a lovely faux-hawk w/ my newly met bestie, julie in the background. she became a regular partner in the hair crimes i committed against myself even if she wasn't going to make the same foolish hair mistakes on herself that i did.

this was when i developed the concept of "hair is intended for amusement purposes - if it's looking good, it amuses me; if it's looking bad, it amuses others." i believe that the scales don't tip in my favor by this standard.

there's a whole slew of other exciting hair follies, but this has gotten too long already. so tune in next time for the second installment of hair bonanza - the bald years.