Curls

Curls

High school, nineteen sixty-five.

I watched my eating. Thin was popular, I cut down to peanut butter, no jelly! I was within the acceptable, barely. I dressed in non-flashy, non-new looking, non-comfortable, (except to clothes manufacturers) but you couldn’t be caught in actually comfortable clothes! I could blend! What I couldn’t blend was my hair. Strawberry blonde, natural curls. Sounds nice huh, no. Must be dark and straight!

I managed the straight pretty well. It was easy! Unpleasant, but easy! Every night I’d wrap my hair tightly around my head, pinned down, and covered with a swim cap. By morning, straight hair! (most of the time…) Of course, if it was raining, snowing, misty, basically any moisture at all, the curls popped back up like hungry chickens…

The dark was another story. I wanted to dye it, but my mother was adamant: NO. She did some hair dressing and said it would be a disaster, and I should appreciate my “lovely strawberry blonde curls!” Right.

So, I did it at a friend’s sleepover. Her parents away, we had the whole house to ourselves! Out came the dye, gloves and my hair.

When it was over we were so excited, until her cat ran off with a glove and we raced around, as it dripped dye on everything… Finally catching him, we turned on the bathroom light to get my first view of the new me. I cried.

I skipped school two days until they fixed it as much as possible, at a shop that cost me my allowance for three months!

That was my junior year. As a senior they put me in the year book as “Our curliest blonde!” I kept my hair natural, it was just easier… and actually it became quite popular years later!

Go figure!