Now Playing -
Now Eating -
Now Feeling -
Now Tweeting
- Melanie
...you know the rest.
I had perms for probably ten years. I was girly-girl enough in most respects, but simply hopeless with hair. And I'd always coveted curls, so perms it was.
Finally, I got out of college and said, "Let's see what my hair really does." Chopped off six inches, and commenced growing it out.
The following summer I stepped up the effort, living as I was in a mostly unairconditioned house in Illinois, with four of my castmates in A Chorus Line. (The less hair I have, the cooler I am.) We did a lot of things together as a group; shopping, laundry (once our washer died) and...going for haircuts. We found a local place we liked, and the boys went often, seeing as they needed to remain well-kempt for the show. Especially my friend Dan (yes, Jill C-W, that Dan), who was so anal-retentive about his looks that he shaved the hairline at the nape of his neck in the shower every day. Dan nearly lost his mind the previous year when we did Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and the brothers were not allowed to cut their hair for three months.
Anyway, in the span of our two-month rehearsal period/run, I probably had 3 or 4 haircuts. By the fall, my hair was shoulder length, and completely straight for the first time since grade school. I was going to keep growing it, and have long straight hair that was the envy of all those curly girls I'd always coveted.
And then I did a hair show. I answered an ad in Backstage for a show at the Javits Center - free cut, color and styling products. I had asked for a chin-length bob, and to maybe have a little red thrown in my hair.
The day of the show, I was made up, pinned into a low-cut jumpsuit and brought down to the stylist's booth out on the floor. The first sign that this might not go well: there were no mirrors anywhere. The second: my stylist brought out...The Hose. Turns out he was giving me something he called a "Hose Cut." He had me hold a shampoo sprayer hose tight against the back of my neck and cut along it, to give my bob a nice even line. But the line was even with my jaw. My chin-length bob was a jaw-length bob, two inches shorter than I thought it would be.
And then he brought out the electric razor. He lifted my hair up, and buzzed the back of my neck from my hairline to the base of my skull.
The audience is oohing and aahing, I'm sitting there wide-eyed and smiling, feeling the air on the back of my neck, and trying to sneak a hand up to my head to feel the extent of the damage. And thinking "OhmygawdIhavenohair! OhmygawdIhavenohair!"
You wonder why there were no mirrors?
As they walked us back upstairs, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror by the shampoo area. I had no hair.
I was so stunned by the unanticipated loss o'hair that I almost bailed on the hair coloring. I refused the red, especially after seeing a fellow model whose hair was a shade that could only be called "Bozo" and was coiled up on top of her head like some Seussian meringue. Instead I got some light golden browniness put in. You could barely tell. Which was FINE with me.
I walked to Penn Station with Seuss Meringue, who was bemoaning the hours she'd be spending that night trying to comb all the shellac out of her hair. Me? I was busy pulling up the collar of my coat because my once-insulated neck was freezing.
It wasn't so bad, it was just a shock. It grew out eventually (hair does that, y'know), and came in handy in the Cole Porter revue I did a couple of months later. And feeling the "puppy butt" hair on the back of my neck was always a diversion.
Thus endeth my first foray into modeling.
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a very fine cat indeed - Friday, Jan. 17, 2014
happy new year! - Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013
this is where i am - Saturday, Jun. 30, 2012
this is how it is - Friday, Feb. 24, 2012
a very late last year's wrap-up - Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012
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