“How can women think with all this hair?”
That quote is from an inconsequential bit of fluff, “Switch,” a 1991 movie starring Ellen Barkin. Plot: a sexist man gets murdered by three ex-girlfriends and is reincarnated as a woman, whereupon he gets a taste of his own medicine.
Silly movie. Classic quote. How indeed?
You can pass all the equality laws you want, but there is one arena in which men and women will forever diverge. Women are obsessed with hair. Men, on the other hand, tend to notice hair when it’s so long they can no longer see. (Or when it disappears, but that’s another story.)
Can you imagine a man saying anything at all about Sen. Barbara Boxer’s hair? I rest my case.
I recently had my own hair drama. Annette, my longtime hairdresser, cut it too short. I looked in the mirror and saw a straight-hair version of Miss Jane Hathaway on “The Beverly Hillbillies.”
The last time Annette did this, I tried to be nice about it. Obviously, I was too nice.
I paced the floor, rehearsing speeches. I railed to my husband.
He said, “I think your hair looks cute.”
“No, it’s not cute. It would be cute on an attractive 18-year-old girl. That, I’m not.”
How could Annette do this to me? I thought we were friends.
Allow me to back up a little. Into every woman’s life, a hairdresser geographic — to Seattle, San Francisco or perhaps New York — falls. You then have the trauma of finding someone new, which can take two days or two years.
If your inner cheapskate holds sway, like it did with me, you’ll begin your search at the walk-in discount chain. That’s where, some 15 years ago, I found my hairdresser Annette. I was hesitant to go, because last time I was there a woman from Romania cut my hair too short. (She did the same thing to my husband. Chop, chop. “Good businessman’s haircut,” the woman said.)
“Oh, her,” said Annette, after she ditched the discount chain for a chair at a trendier shop. “I remember her. Yep, she was big on chopping.”
Annette was something of an artist. She took forever to cut my hair, but the result was a style I never had to fix or even blow dry.
And when you spend 100 minutes together every five weeks, you get to know a person. When I discovered her, Annette was a single mom in her mid 20s, and her little girl was just starting school. I don’t recall who her boyfriend was at the time. In those days she dated a psychiatrist and a mechanic and everything in between.
Annette’s life was always more chaotic and financially challenging than mine, but I never saw that as a failing. Only the biggest hearts end up with a houseful of sick relatives and abandoned animals.
She was always changing shops. I can count six places where Annette cut my hair. Seven, if you include the time she came to my house. She wanted to style the wig I got from a local cancer charity. I tried to give her some money. “Don’t you even think you’re going to pay me for this,” she said, pulling back as if I was handing her a snake.
When my hair grew back in, I let Annette talk me into dying it red. Once you’ve been bald, the sky’s the limit. But the beautiful deep maroon faded to orange. Before long I went back to my natural brown. Just having hair again was exciting enough.
I went to Annette’s wedding, and she came to my Bad Art Party, where everyone brought a thrift-store painting to celebrate my one-year anniversary surviving ovarian cancer. I did not think there would be a second anniversary. But there was.
And just like that, one day Annette’s daughter was graduating from high school, and I was surviving. It seemed as though Annette and I just might grow old together.
That is, if hair drama had not intervened.
Why, I wanted to know, did she cut my hair so short? Why not err on the side of too long? She could always cut off more. The first time she cut my hair too short, she said it was because she wasn’t paying enough attention. Is that what happened again? If so, why? (Left unsaid: I pay four times what my husband pays for a haircut. Why isn’t that enough to get your attention?)
Annette threw out a few excuses, but they did not make sense to me. Trust had been breached. There would be consequences. (What consequences, I didn’t know. But something!)
What an intimate relationship women develop with their hairdressers. It’s no coincidence that Marie Laveau, the 19th-century voodoo priestess of New Orleans, was a hairdresser. The gossip she overheard in her shop gave her leverage over everyone in town.
I’m pretty sure that when the last e-mail to Annette left my outbox, I’d reduced her to tears. Her next reply was signed: Always my love, Annette.
Then, like a summer thunderstorm, it was over. In a few weeks I’ll be back in her chair, and we’ll be swapping stories like before. Both of us a little bruised, a little humbled, no doubt.
Annette is quite a bit younger than me. Somehow I know: She’ll be at my deathbed. I will tell the nurses to let her in, that she’s my sister.
[originally published by Politics Daily in 2010]
