When a Southern Woman Rambles... by L. Avery Brown (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

Needless to say, there was no way a cup of ice was going to freeze the chewing gum in my hair so it could be ‘picked out’. No, in order for that to happen, my parents would have had to dip me in a vat of ice water much the way that Thetis dipped her son, Achilles, into the River Styx.

Then a passerby suggested to my parents that they try using mayonnaise or salad dressing on my hair as they are oily substances which might allow my parents to ‘slide’ the gum out my hair. Did it work? Let’s just say that there was so much Italian dressing in my hair that by the time my parents pulled the USS Williams into a parking space in the center of the tiny town nearby, all you would have needed was a bowl of lettuce and some bacon bits and you would have had one mean salad – with a side of hair-n-gum.

And dread upon dread there was no beauty salon nearby... only a barber shop. The kind of place my father went to every few weeks to get his hair trimmed so that it looked neat but never ‘styled’. But since the barber shop was the only thing available – the barber shop it was. I could see a look of fear in my mother’s eyes as I sat in the chair. I know what she was thinking: Dear Lord, he’s going to have to shave her head!

The barber, a very old fellow, didn’t even wash my hair first as it would have been for naught and might have made the situation worse. It was all my mother could do to stay calm as my father comforted her. I remember the barber wrapping a piece of white tissue paper around my little neck and then whipping the cape up and then snapping it into position. He lifted his super sharp scissor and then I heard my mother give a pained sort of yelp with the first ‘snip’. Snip-snip-snip and snip-snip-snip some more until the stuff was cut out.

Next came the job of washing out the zesty dressing. I’ve often wondered how much shampoo was needed to get all the salad oil out of my hair. Likewise, I can only venture to guess what the barber was thinking when he saw me walk into his thoroughly male barbering shop.

What a sight it must have been; a little girl dressed in her Sunday best on a Saturday afternoon sporting a head doused in salad dressing and dotted with clumps of strange purply-colored chewing gum that still retained a bit of its fruity-licious aroma standing there with two utterly frustrated parents.  Oh, heavens, I’m sure he told my story until the day he died.

Once the oil was all washed away, the barber returned me to the chair and set about ‘styling’ my hair the best he could considering that the first go round with his clippers was simply to get the stuff out. What was left was nothing more than long, uneven strands of squeaky clean hair.

And for once, my mother, who’d actually had a permanent put in my hair when I was barely four (no one really worried about the effects of such powerful chemicals on small children in ’74) to give it a little personality (it ‘fell out’ about a month later), was grateful my hair was straight as a stick. Because the resulting haircut was a boxy, layered cut somewhere between a page-boy and a pixie and if my hair had been in anyway ‘bouncy’ it would have looked like I stuck my finger in a light socket as opposed to lying flat on my head.

We finally made it to Grandmother and Granddaddy’s house, albeit a few hours late, and my grandmother laughed when my parents recounted the harrowing hair tale and then she reminded my mother that even the worst haircuts grow out and not to worry because one day, it'll make a terribly funny story. Which brings me back to little Chelsea as I told her mother what my grandmother had told her - don't worry, it'll grow out and you'll laugh about it later.

Then, with my groceries all bagged and paid for, I bid adieu and good luck to the mother-daughter duo knowing in a couple of months no one would ever know of the misfortunate hair cutting incident. And I could see that Chelsea’s mom was coming to realize her plight wasn’t so bad. After all, there are people all over the world who dream of having troubles as trivial as the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ trials and tribulations of ‘bang-bangs having been snip-ped with Me-Maw’s snippers’.

As for what became of my hair, my grandmother was right. My hair did grow back. In fact, it grew very long – all the way down my back. After a while though it lost its bright blonde brilliance and turned a rich honey-golden blonde and then it got darker and darker until it got to the warm brown color it has now, several decades later.

But it’s still straight as a stick and as baby fine as it was when I was a little girl. Although there was one catastrophic moment years after my ‘Salad Bowl Head’ days when it wasn’t so straight…

I would like to say that the salad bowl head incident back when I was 5 was my only real hair catastrophe but alas, I cannot. Oh, yes...I would like to say that was the case.

However, there have been more. Some were not nearly as bad as having wound up with a pseudo-pageboy haircut while others were, regrettably, even worse. Like when I was 16 and in an expression of love for my sister who was getting married, I agreed to get my extremely long and still baby-fine but considerably darker hair permed because she thought it would look absolutely fabulous in her wedding photos. I was a little wary at first but I must confess that I’d always been envious of my sister’s thick, wavy hair so I agreed and secretly hoped that maybe it might wind up looking almost as luxurious as hers.

But…it didn’t. Nope. Not in the least.

That’s right. After spending nearly four hours on a lovely Saturday afternoon smelling the foul odor of the permanent wave solutions (yes, solution with an ‘s’ because I was told my hair was so long it required two {yes...2} permanent wave kits to get it all thoroughly coated) and feeling as if my head was going to fall off my shoulders because the weight of the dozens and dozens of curling rods and the wet solution made me feel as if someone had poured a stinging cement concoction atop my head, when the rods were all removed and I had been rinsed…it was clear that the permanent didn’t turn out as expected.

That’s right - I had neither luscious curly locks nor ravishing grapevine tendrils cascading down my back. Although, I suppose my hair did look somewhat – how should I put it? – fluffier…in a frazzled sort of way.

And I thought, Fluff is good. Right? 

No.  Not so much!  As I was soon to learn - while fluffy is somewhat synonymous with full when one speaks of hair…the particular version of fluff on my head was actually little sprigs of fried hair that had been eaten away by the caustic solution. 

Then, as if that wasn’t enough, when Shelley, the beautician who gave me the perm, saw that my mother, sister and I realized that her handiwork didn’t quite turn out to be all that we hoped it would be she said, “Oh, don’t worry. This sort of thing sometimes happens with fine hair. You can come back in 2 weeks and I’ll put a protein pack on it. Then we’ll redo the perm. It’ll be fabulous!”

We looked at her as if she was crazy whereupon she emphatically added, “I promise. Trust me. It'll look absolutely faaaaabulous.”

Who can argue with ‘absolutely faaaaabulous’? Besides, she said she promised! How would someone dare consider breaking a promise of such magnitude? This was her job…she was a certified beautician. I saw her little license in a frame over her booth. It even had a gold foil star on it and if I’d learned one thing during my nearly seventeen years on Earth…they don’t give gold foil star sticker to just anybody.  

*Note to self:
● Promises, where money is concerned, are as reliable as a dam made of toilet paper; 
● Beauticians often trade booths so the license you see may not be for the person who stands in front of thee; and,
● Yes, they do just give those to anybody!

I nervously stared in the mirror as Shelley tamed some of the wilder looking sprigs with her clippers and when she was done I suppose my hair didn’t really look that bad. Sure, it was poofy. But it was the late 80’s and thanks to the proliferation of hair-bands and mullets, ‘poofy’ was popular. And Shelley even showed me how to ‘scrunch-n-dry’ my wet hair with super-hold mousse and a dryer so that when I went to school the following Monday I could look fabulous for my friends. (But not 'absolutely faaaaabulous' because I’d have to wait 2 more weeks to experience that level of awesome hairness.)

So, I washed my hair then scrunched and dried my fluffy-frizz-fried 'do' on Monday morning and smiled brightly for my parents before I left for school. My father, who was usually quick with his words, looked up from his breakfast plate and stared at me for a moment before asking, ‘why does it still look wet?’

I remember laughing and kissing his forehead before I walked out the door as assured him that was it was supposed to look that way.  Honestly, didn’t he know anything about fashion? 

When I got to school and went to my first class, I got rave reviews. At least I think they were rave. But now I’m not so sure if they were just being nice or if they, like the citizens in the story the Emperor’s New Clothes who fawned over the naked king thinking they’d be seen as foolish for not knowing style when they saw it, were putting up a front when they commented on my new look because most of the remarks started with, ‘Oooh, did you do something to your hair? Did you get it permed?’

Maybe that should have been a clue to me as it was beyond obvious to anyone with half a brain cell that my hair had been permed…either that or maybe they thought I’d finally decided to forego all those silly warnings and stuck a pair of scissors into an electrical outlet.

It was only after my friends had been assured that yes, I did intentionally alter my hair using a corrosive chemical concoction that they said, ‘Oh, my God! It looks sooooo totally – (hesitate) – different’ after which they reached out to touch my mousse-epoxy coated hair, squeezing it in their hands