HAIR

                                                                         HAIR


     The judge looked sternly over his bench at the woman standing before him.
     "You are charged with four counts of aggravated assault, three cases of disturbing the peace and it says here you tried to blow up a building. These are serious charges," he said. "What do you have to say for yourself?"
     "I was having a bad hair day."
     The judge sat back in his padded chair and ran his fingers through his own well-manicured mane.
     "Oh no. Well. A bad hair day. What are we going to do about this?"
     "Don't you just hate it when that happens?" asked the defense attorney."Some days you get up and look in the mirror and you know you may as well blow up a building."
     The judge looked down at the defendant.
     "Have you tried that new mousse made of cherry pits and milkweed? Does wonders for split ends. One of the prosecutors told me about it a couple of weeks ago and I can already tell the difference."
     The prosecutor held up his hands.
     "Your honor, I had no idea about the circumstances surrounding this offense. The arresting officer didn't say a word to me about the frizzies. I suggest probation on this case, on the condition that the defendant condition."
     A bad hair day. It can happen to anyone. And in this time of acute hair fashion awareness, it has replaced PMS an excuse for any wrongdoing.
     When I was a kid back in Callisburg nobody had a bad hair day. Certainly not men, who either relied on a combover or flat top wax. Girls and women rolled their hair on pink brush rollers and pinned each one directly to their heads with pink plastic pins. Then they went to bed. The brushes in the rollers embedded themselves in your scalp. The pins pierced your skull and entered your brain. The next morning when you pried the things out of your cranial cavity, and you had industrial strength curl. And if the hair threatened to go flat, you simply reinstated the curlers and wore them to school.
     Some of the girls with long hair wore round cardboard frozen orange juice containers on their heads. With the little round metal ends punched out they became maxi-rollers. Some girls never took these out of their hair and I can only assume they thought the empty-orange-juice-container look was better than mini-hair.
     A few years later good hair became big hair, especially in Texas. It meant back-combing your tresses high into the air and emptying a can of something called "Spray Net" over it. Then you let it dry and gently combed the top layer into a helmet shape. A tornado couldn't move that hairdo. Older women of a certain religious leaning often put things called rats into their long hair, making a series of fascinating bumps that gave the appearance of several small animals burrowed in there.
     My mother got her hair "fixed" once a week. As though it were broken. She came home from "The Hair Box" or "Leona's Kut N Kurl" complaining that the hair was too short, too long, too full or too flat. Obviously, it was not fixed at all. But that didn't stop her from preserving the do. Every night before she went to bed she would wrap a pink stretchy thing around her head to protect the curl she didn't like in the first place.
     Back then you had your Spray Net. You had your Dippity Do. But you didn't have hair products called "Bed Head." And you couldn't have made a down payment on a house with your toiletries bill either. Or resorted to plastique on a bad hair day.