hair we go again

Thursday, nov. 2, 2006   |   0 comments

I’ve been struggling with my hair for a few years now. And pretty much my whole life before that. The main problem with it is that there’s just way, way too much of it. Gathered into a ponytail, the circumference is as big as my wrist, which is a lot when it comes to hair. I know thick hair is supposed to be this glorious feature, but in practice, it’s just not so great. I’ve had hairdressers confess, with an embarrassed giggle, that my hair scares them, that they don’t know quite what to do with it. If it’s cut short, it grows horizontally. If it’s long, I wear it up all the time because down it’s this floating, huge thing, and it’s just everywhere, in my eyes, in my mouth. Once it even rotted off because I was wearing it up so much that it wasn’t drying properly between showers. And so mould started to form. My hair actually, seriously started to smell like an old sponge. And then it all fell off.

So like a lost soul looking for some kind of god or forest lizard that has all the answers, I am on this neverending quest to find the miracle haircut that’s going to look good without the aide of clips or bands or metal contraptions. And there’ve been some real failures along the way. There was the Fry Guy haircut (mushroom top with jellyfish danglies). After that I went to Patty at Supercuts in Los Angeles. My friend Sophia goes to Patty, as does her four-year-old daughter, Dinah, and Sophia’s mother, Gwen, they all go to Patty. So, having nothing but jellyfish tendrils to loose, I too went to Patty, and she was pretty awesome. First of all, she was the first hairdresser to tell me flat-out no. I pointed at a picture I’d found in the haircut book — of a lithe girl with mid-length rockstar cut with layered piece-y chunks all over — and Patty just straight-up said that was never going to happen with my hair, no way. And it was a relief, knowing that there were some kinds of cute that I simply had to give up on. In fact, she told me my hair was really more the consistency of African American hair, and if I ever wanted to really treat myself, I should go in to a specialty salon and get my hair straightened. After finally weaning myself off the endless maintenance cycle of hair dye, though, I was reluctant to get involved in chemical straightening. Chemical straightening is not part of operation “perfect, effortless hair.” So I just told Patty to cut off the weirdo tendrils and then I asked her to give me short, choppy bangs, “You know, like a mental patient.” She kept holding back and holding back, keeping the bangs nice and sensible and mommy, but I kept pushing her until they were exactly the right kind of short and choppy, little Amelie bangs. Patty stepped back and said, “Oh right, I see. Mental patient bangs.“ But really, they looked good. Great! Unfortunately the rest of my hair was just sort of a short blob, and pretty much did what it always does at that awkward above-the-shoulder length: it curled under into a Vader helmet. So I went right back to wearing it up all the time. But the mental patient bangs were very cute, and totally sane.

Fueled by my partial success with Patty, for my next cut I tried out a Supercuts up here, but it turns out that Patty is a perhaps a singular case. The guy at the 24th Street Supercuts took about ten minutes to cut my hair — usually it takes over an hour because, again, there’s just too much of it — but even though he clearly cut a lot of corners, he still managed to leave whole sections of my hair completely untouched, as in an inch longer than the rest of my hair. And not in a tubular 80s way either.

So then finally my friend the lovely Leisa recommended her hairdresser, Jules at Dekko Salon, who specializes in helping ladies grow their hair out in the most dignified way possible. I went in to Dekko five months ago, and Jules laughed and marveled at my hair magnitude, but not in a nervous or overwhelmed way. Then she neatened up the not-so-Supercut leftovers, made a joke about how even that little trim produced a pile of hair on the ground so big that looked like “a dead cat,” and then told me to come back in five months. She was very firm: I wouldn’t even be allowed to make an appointment until five months had passed. After she spun me around with that little hand mirror so I could admire the back of my head, I said to her, “Wow, this looks good! Maybe I’ll just keep it at this length.”

Jules: “Oh, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

So yesterday’s haircut marked the big five-month point. Over the long waiting stretch my hair had finally made it past my shoulders, but it’s wave and bounce and general perverseness kept pulling it back up above the shoulder, adding a new deranged flip into the mix that made me look like I’d been drinking, and sleeping on nest of licking cow tongues. So Jules tidied things up again, trimmed of the corners of the crazy flip, even gave me some feathering in the bang region, then she instructed me to come back in February.

I do like this interim cut a lot, it’s even better even than last time. And it looked great right after she poured on a fistful of fancy cream and then painstakingly twisted my hair into fifty individual sections to give it “tamed stallion” whorls and waves. But as I wended my way home, slowly things started to puff and expand. And now here I sit, my hair strapped back into a ponytail once again. But my bangs look good, very “in your [and my] face,” very The Elf Who Wanted To Be a Dentist. Four more months!