Curls For the girls (hair story 3)

Curls for the girls
Waves for the babes
Napps for the **** (It was some thing racially offensive, use your imagination)

That was a popular saying when I was growing up. Your hair, in order to be attractive needed to have a curl some or waves. The interesting thing about this saying is that it applied to males attracting girls or babes or females being girls or babes to attract guys.

This entry isn’t really about that saying…..it just reminded me of when my soul glew.

On spring break in 6th grade my best friend's mom offered to get my hair braided for Easter. She was getting her daughter’s hair done and since I was her best friend, we could look alike.
BAD IDEA!

My aunt took that as an insult, that my hair did not look good and the Saturday before Easter, I took my first trip, kicking and screaming, to the beauty salon. I had bad memories of curls. People walking around with shower caps on outside, hair that literally dripped and the big whammy, when my cousin’s hair caught on fire . Just like Michael Jackson. That’s what happens when you put highly flammable gunk in your hair. It was winter and my aunt asked her to move the logs in the fireplace, a little spark flew up and she screamed, and we panicked to extinguish the flames. Luckily she wasn’t hurt.

Flash back to me in the shop…She told her beautician (that’s what they were called back then) to fix my hair for Easter.

Fast forward past the perm rods the stinky smells and all that. This was the late nineties! This style had been out of date for ten years already. I was so scared to go outside. SO scared to go back to school. All of the kids kept asking me, “Why did you get a curl?” I mumbled. “ Cause my Aunty made me.” The laughter, the ‘drip, drip’ references and ‘follow the drip’ jokes were ongoing. One boy made me want to tumble with him, I was so mad. We were learning haiku in our English class. The teacher explained the structure and how the Japanese often use nature as a source of inspiration. He took that and ran with it. His poem;

When it rains outside
All you hear is drip, drip
Drip, drip,drip, drip, drip

There was a large uproar of laughter because everyone, except my teacher knew he was talking about me. I got revenge. I wrote an epic poem about him.(As you may have guessed, I was a nerd) The diss of all times. I won’t share it but, Oh my goodness did he wish he never wrote that haiku .

That same year when school was out. I asked my aunt not to get my hair done. She was up for saving a buck and said that “ if I wanted to look like who shot John” then that was okay with her.

My hair fell out that summer, at the line where the curl and my natural hair met. Going to school with no hair would be worse than going with a cur.l AND to add insult to injury, it was the most important year of middle school - 8th grade.