My Dad always wanted his three daughters to have long hair. In real life that seemed to be impossible for us. We had inherited, not the thick wavy hair from my mother’s English genes but rather the thin,
took- forever- to -grow hair from the patrimony of the Irish Smithwicks. None of us, the three sisters, were able to grow our hair beyond a thin stretch to our shoulders. Thick hair was aspirational
My poor mother tried to make up for our awful locks by wrapping them in rag curls which resulted in a style that made us look like we had walked in the rain. She tried braiding our hair. We could have braids, odd looking spikes of hair that stood out to the side. Just pitiful. We yearned for the type of hair that could have a luxurious French braid cascading down our backs. Instead, we sported two ordinary thin plaits that extended to the middle of our necks. We didn’t have fancy bows to hold the hair in place either. These babies required the use of rubber bands. Stylish we were not.
Our Smithwick locks seemed to gather knots and strange looking whirls when we slept, leading to daily screams of pain as Mom tried to undo these oddities with a wide toothed comb. Ouch!
At one point, in consultation with our grandmother, she decided to utilize what was new technology in the hair business, a Tony home permanent. I have to believe that they had our best interests and coiffeurs in mind. I have to.
Boy did that stuff stink. There isn’t a better word to describe the odor. It was awful… ammonia and who knows what else. And the permanent rods which had little spikes in them to hold them onto your head? More ouch. The results? Do you remember those bottle brush trees that we put around the Christmas trees? Well, our hair looked exactly like them with a touch of the Bride of Frankenstein. Tony of Tony home permanent didn’t include what you do with the hair after it is permed, so Mom just brushed it out. We had to live with this.
There are pictures of us that need to be burned so that future generations didn’t think that we used keys in electrical sockets to create this look.
Again, with our best in mind, Mom decided to use professional services so that the pictures that were taken at Christmas were “lookable”. We were going to the beauty parlor, as it was called in the dawn of hair styling. The shop to which she took us was on the ground floor of the same building as the office of our former doctor and next door to the A & P on Fourth Avenue. We were there to have our problematic locks turned into something called the Poodle. Think of the fur on the top of a poodle’s head and that was the goal. The beautician had both old and new hair transformation technologies from which to choose. For us it was the modern ammonia hair cocktail while we watched others sit under a scary apparatus that included a large metal hoop from which wires descended at the end of which clips were attached. The beautician fastened the clips in the customer’s hair and then flipped a switch to engage the electrical current to heat up the clips. Oh, my gosh! This seemed to be like medieval torture. No one seemed to be hurt by this, but it was frightening to three little girls, sitting in a cloud of permanent waving solution gasping for breath across the salon from these apparatuses.
We left the salon looking like three human poodles. Tight curly heads that devolved into yet another bottle brush “do” after being brushed.
We tried over the years, as we grew older, to find ways to ameliorate the problems of our awful hair, coming to the conclusion that only be setting our hair every night could we look presentable on the next day. During those years we evolved from hours of pin curls to setting with and sleeping on rollers with spiney brushes inside. We were able to endure the pain for the result that lasted unless it rained.
Then came heated rollers, followed by the curling iron and styles that we couldn’t emulate because we didn’t have long enough hair and others, shorter but requiring thicker hair.
It was a lifelong battle that has required constant attention, lots of promissory “products’ , a good stylist and a substantial allocation of money and time …. For passable success and the realization that you should enjoy your luck on the good hair days and on the bad ones you wear a hat.
