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Felicity & I & Our Bad Hair Days |
Keri Russell….bad hair day?
Photo Credit: Norman Jean Roy
Copyright 2000 The WB Network
Have you noticed the grief poor Keri Russell
of Felicity has gone through so far this season because she got
her hair cut last summer?
If you listen to the hair nags, you might get the impression
she'd passed U.S. nuclear secrets to the Chinese through her
hair salon.
When her TV character, Felicity Porter, headed for the barber's chair in the closing moments of last season, it was a spontaneous act of rebellion. If she cut off that fabulous mane of electric hair, she figured, maybe people would see her as the new person she wanted to be.
Well, they did, of course. Trouble was most people didn't like the new person she wanted to be. Like they really couldn't see beyond the Felicity hairdo after all. In my opinion, this was the writers' test of our collective value system - and most of us flunked it.
Meanwhile, those of us who would love Keri/Felicity even if she shaved her head and wore a pork chop bone in her nose, have had to suffer the insults right along with her. Even the normally thoughtful, kind-hearted Noel (Scott Foley) couldn't find anything more encouraging to tell her except, "It'll grow back."
I've really been identifying with her all during her ordeal because this is something Felicity and I now have in common: The pain and suffering of too many consecutive bad hair days.
My ordeal goes back quite a few more years than hers. In fact, I date it from my junior high school days when our family was short on cash and my mom decided to cut our hair rather than send us to the barbershop. She equipped herself with a pair of clipping shears, a pro-style shaver and a sort of comb that had a razor blade built into it.
Those first months were the tough ones. That's when I heard some of the most devastating "bowl-haircut" jokes the seventh-grade intellect could devise. I began to dread the sight of that black and red stool Mom made us sit on while she clipped away our perfectly good hair. But my little brother and I learned to take it like men because we got to see how at least one man took it: Our Dad. He not only took it well, but actually made out like he was in the first chair at Vidal Sassoon.
Mom actually got pretty good at it over time and the jokes died out, but then I got to high school, where the rules of society required me to get my hair cut real short, far shorter than Felicity's present "do." In those days, you had a choice of the basic crewcut or the flattop, which gave you that quasi-Frankenstein look. Being a monster movie buff, I naturally opted for the flattop, which Mom couldn't bring herself to do.
That's when I took up with Joe the Barber. He could do flattops in record time, especially if you weren't too particular about how level they were. If I got there before his lunch break on Saturday, I was usually all right. But, after lunch, he tended to lose a little perspective.
"I won't say your flattop is lopsided," one of the kids at school sneered one day, "but I bet the flies have a heck of a time landing on it."
By the time I got to college, long hair was coming back, so I grew mine out again. But after three or four years of butch wax and pomade to make it stand up, I had the devil's time getting it to stay down. My Dad swore by something called HQZ Oil, but I needed so much of it that I left oil stains everywhere I went.
Truthfully, I didn't really start to see light at the end of my bad hair tunnel until long after I got married and my wife assumed the responsibility of getting my hair to look decent. This was the female equivalent of Hercules cleaning out those stables.
But just when the right combination of stylists, shampoos, sprays and mousses was producing enviable results, my hair started to go gray and the delicate chemistry of it all began to fall apart. I've resisted all exhortations to color my hair and have decided to go into the coming night with my natural hair, even if it means looking like Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer from the Little Rascals.
People like Felicity and I shouldn't pay any mind to the hair nags anyway. They take our attention away from the real person and focus it on the hairstyle. That's superficial.
Besides, if you want to talk about really bad hair, take a look at Gil Bellows and that bleached buzz cut he's wearing on Ally McBeal this season. For my money, he's having the worst bad hair year anyone's had since Don King made his TV debut.
Copyright 2000 by Ron Miller
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