I need a haircut again. As always, I’ve put off getting the haircut for several weeks longer than I should have, and my split ends have transformed my head into a fuzzy bell. The cycle always repeats itself the same way: my ’do starts to look a bit shaggy and I realize I need to get it cut; I decide not to get it cut, because my hairdresser always cuts it too short anyway, and besides, longer hair looks more feminine, and with a little patience I too can land myself a high-paying gig in a NutraVive commercial; I invest in the myriad pins, clips, headbands, scrunchies, and other darling hair-restraining means by which TV stars make their hair look cute during that awkward growing-out phase; it becomes clear that I have neither the time for such elaborate cuteness nor the skill to effect it, at which time I revert to Plans B (bobby pin stuffed into side of head at hazardous angle) and C (scruffy braiding reminiscent of After-School Special on homeless teens); I suffer in this fashion for several weeks; and finally, I wake up one morning feeling really bushy and stumble directly to the phone to beg my hairdresser for her earliest appointment. After the haircut, I come home and stare at my reflection in the mirror while telling myself numbly, “Well, it’s not horrible, exactly, and from certain angles, I don’t look like a man.” Over the next few days the cut “comes in” a bit and I calm down about it, and six or eight weeks later the whole thing starts again.I dread haircuts. I dread them the way tiny towheaded children dragged to the barber for the first time dread them. Sitting in the chair, chin obediently on my chest, listening with increasing panic to the snipping going on somewhere near my neck, I convince myself that now I’ve done it: I’ve gone and gotten the haircut that will prompt society to ostracize me once and for all. I’ll appear at a bar sporting the new coif, and my friends will look at my tufted skull, look at each other, look back at me, and say firmly, “You know, Sar, we’ve put up with a lot. The foot odor, the poetry readings, the way you always take the last cookie. But this hairstyle – well, we just can’t continue. You’ll have to find yourself new friends. Sorry.” Yes, this haircut will separate me at last from my vision of myself as attractive, or at least presentable. Store clerks will begin calling me “sir.” Children will tug on their mothers’ sleeves and whisper, while staring at me saucer-eyed, “Mommy, what is that?”

At least I’m single at the moment, so I don’t have to worry about a boyfriend emitting a splatter-film scream of unadulterated terror and fleeing at the sight of my shorn head. In my experience, boyfriends don’t like haircuts, or rather they don’t like the idea of haircuts, probably because they don’t have all that much confidence in their ability to deliver a convincing compliment while secretly thinking, “I hope that grows in quickly.” Boyfriends will generally greet casual mention of a hair appointment with a worried “oh . . . really?” followed by an “are you making any, you know, big changes?” of studied casualness. But it is my tearful return from said hair appointment that really tests a boyfriend’s mettle. Regular old friends and acquaintances will rave that it looks great no matter how bad the hack job, but for a boyfriend, the stakes are higher. My boyfriends have historically fallen into one of two camps in terms of managing my melodramatic reactions to haircuts: the offering-to-repair-the-damage group, and the damnation-with-horribly-depressing-faint-praise group. Unsurprisingly, I prefer the first group, even though the “repair” part is pretty much an exercise in throwing good scissors after bad. I came home from one memorably disastrous styling session, introduced myself to my then boyfriend Slim as Dorothy Hamill, burst into tears, and flung myself full-length onto my bed, refusing to let Slim console me. Slim allowed me a wallowing period and then dragged me into the bathroom with a pair of scissors, telling me that he loved it, really, and thought it looked just fine, great even, really, but perhaps it could stand “a bit of evening up.” After a solid hour of up-evening, I looked like Tank Girl – if Tank Girl had stuck her head into a Cuisinart filled with henna during a severe allergy attack. But Slim meant well, anyway. Other honeys stick to the terra firma of back-handed compliments. You know that scene in My So-Called Life after Patty cuts all her hair off, and Graham can only come up with “it shows your ears more”? I’ve had that conversation. I’ve had that conversation more than once. I’ve heard everything from “it’s so – close to your head” to “wow, it’s – wow” to “no, no, I just need time to get used to it” to “I didn’t ‘mean’ anything, I just asked if you wanted to borrow one of my baseball hats.”

Besides, even if I get a dodgy haircut once in a while, few bouts with the shears can compare with some of the bad Sarah hair of yesteryear . . . starting with the haircut I had as a four-year-old. I will give my mother the benefit of the doubt and assume that she did not cut my hair in that, uh, “style” herself, because to think otherwise could only mean that she donned a blindfold and waved scissors around my head between sips of bathtub gin, and I just refuse to believe that. But I can’t deny that, in pictures of me taken in the mid-seventies, I look like a very tiny mental patient wearing a very tiny, very bad wig and waiting patiently to audition for the lead in One Flow-Beed Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Of course, nobody gives a crap at age four; all your peers look like their moms mowed their heads with an egg beater too. But at age twelve – well, fast-forward to the feather-ific ’do I sported in middle school. Oh, yeah, baby – parted in the middle, foofy bear-claw on either side, and let’s not forget the ringlets at the bottom, enhanced with a curling iron. Can’t blame Ma for that one. And how about the super-short bob I got my sophomore year in high school, a style I inexplicably thought would look a lot better permed. If I had the technological know-how, I would insert a sound file here of my mother grumbling, “I tried to talk you out of that, you know,” but I don’t, so I will confine myself to remarking that it did not in fact look “a lot better,” or even “better,” but rather “much much much much worse, worse than any hairstyle has ever looked in history, up to and including styles adopted by Carrot Top, Gertrude Stein, and that kooky hair-shield thing Patti LaBelle had going on.” Once that poof-tastic coif finally grew out, I adopted the default style of Jersey girls in the late eighties: looooong and straaaaaight, with half of my bangs cresting over my forehead like a stiff little whitecap and the other half combed down into little claws. And I did have that Hamill camel for a few brief hours, as I mentioned earlier; alas, those hours did not fall within the seventies. I still don’t know how the stylist interpreted “shorter in the back” to mean “shorter in the front” – perhaps the salon had an “Opposite Day” sign posted above the magazine rack of which I’d failed to take notice – but I do know that the stylist’s handiwork strongly resembled a teardrop-shaped bicycle helmet in shape and rigidity. I didn’t even own a bloody bicycle. (The one up-side: due to the decreased wind resistance, I walked back to my dorm room in record time.)

I haven’t had really hideous hair in a long time. Okay, I don’t think I’ve had really hideous hair in a long time, although others may disagree. My current stylist tends to take liberties with the concept of what constitutes “a trim” or “just take the ends off,” and evidently, “half an inch” means “an inch and a half” in her world, but she doesn’t charge very much, and once I get over the initial shock, her cuts grow in quite well and hold up a long time. But every time, I brace myself for impact, gripping the arms of the stylist’s chair, mentally reviewing my scarf collection in case I have to cover up Elephant Man-style for the next month or two, wondering how long I could avoid appearing in public before my friends would begin to suspect something.

I’d better go make that call. If I get my hair cut today, I can go out in public in only two short weeks.

A niftily-named journal that actually doesn’t have much to do with hair.
This does have to do with hair. Bad hair.

Share!