Read Online Me, My Hair, and I by editor Elizabeth Benedict - Free Book Online

upon me at great expense by a Madison Avenue hairdresser. Before my stepdaughter’s arrival, I decided to have a little fun with the situation. I turned on the TV, put my legs in the air and slathered Jolen cream bleach all over “the carpet.” After two hours, all the hair on my body, from head to toe, correlated. It was all a matching, hideous shade of something my mother calls “pee-pee yellow.”
    A few days later, my four-year-old charge and I were changing in the beach cabana. She noticed that my pubic hair was a blinding Marilyn Monroe blond.
    â€œWhy is your hair there that color?” she said. “Wow.”
    â€œWell, of course, it’s my natural hair color,” I said, sliding into my bikini bottoms. Then I added: “And be sure to tell your mother.”
    Like many New York women, I’ve ventured into J Sisters, that torture palace of Brazilian hair waxing on Fifty-Seventh Street. And every time I have gone, I have stared up at the ceiling—at first glance it appears to be pressed metal, but the curling edges in the corner belie the fact that it is actually wallpaper, a shifty decorating ruse—and lay sweating and screaming as one of the sisters (or cousins, or friends, all of whose names begin with the letter
J
) strips the hair from an area on the body where pain seems sinisterly acute, and I have sworn every time: never again.
    Finally, last year, after a run-in with an ingrown hair that resulted in an infection that required antibiotic treatment—I looked at my doctor in wonderment as he wrote out the prescription, and he said, shaking his head in a kind of rueful sorrow at the state of womanhood, “I have to do this about once a month”—I decided: no more. I like my hair. It keeps me warm in winter, prevents chafing during sports, and stores pheromonal scents. It provides padding. It marks me as a woman, not a child. I will not laser it away. I will keep it. And when it does turn gray, and later I hope white, maybe then I will dye it hot pink.

Kozmic Hippie Hair Breakdown Blues
    ROSIE SCHAAP
    T here she is on the cover of
Skeletons from the Closet
, the Grateful Dead’s 1974 best-of record: Botticelli’s Venus—clutching a red rose—wedged behind a skeleton. Painting nearly five hundred years before the Dead played its first show at Magoo’s Pizza Parlor in 1965, in Menlo Park, California, Sandro Botticelli couldn’t have anticipated that his Venus—that demure, pale-skinned paragon of Western femininity, with her mild gaze, her coy quasi smile, her head subtly, alluringly atilt—would become a model for the late twentieth-century second-wave hippie-girl ideal. And then, there’s her hair: great waves of marigold and sunflower, long enough to conceal her sex, flowing, magnificent. How I once longed for hair like hers; how deeply and unhappily I knew I would never have it.
    As a prototype of the perfect nature girl, Botticelli’s Venus was one of the reasons I felt I never really cut it as a hippie chick, but she was not alone. My hair is naturally brown, and though about as curly as Botticelli’s goddess’s, it is inclined to frizz, in accordance with the practice of the hair of Jewish girls going back—in my imaginings anyway—to Sarah and Rebecca, Leah and Rachel. I suspect neither Joni Mitchell nor Michelle Phillips descend from that line, and if a girl following the Grateful Dead on tour couldn’t have Venus hair, the next best thing was hair like theirs: blond and stick straight and parted in the middle, long and sleek and perfectly in place. My hair can only stand to grow so much, and then, when it has no more will, it stops. My frizz will rebel against even the most assiduous ministrations of the blow-dryer.
    With these real and mythical women as my impossible ideals, at age fifteen, in 1986, I flung myself—my whole, ardent, earnest young self—into the American