Skip to main content

It's Just Hair

Last week a colleague complimented my hairstyle. Genuinely. She wanted to take a picture and show her hairstylist as a suggestion for herself. And I certainly didn't want to be offensive when I
laughed and laughed at her.

See, I used to have very short, cute, urban hair.



Then I got kind of tired of HAVING to get it trimmed every four to six weeks and began to envy ponytails on others. So a year and a half ago or so I conspired with my stylist to grow it out. It was agonizing. All of the layers were different lengths, of course, and as it started to grow hair would stick out in all sorts of odd directions. For a while it just looked like an overgrown short cut, and then it began to look even more awful. Every 8 weeks I would creep whimpering back to her and she would reassure me that it actually was growing, and it wouldn't take much longer, and she'd even it out a little and send me on my way.



Understand, I am very hands-off with my hair anyway. I do not own a blow-dryer. Or styling products. Actually, with my short haircut I didn't even own a comb. I wash it, I towel dry, and I go. Trying to control its length is foreign to me. It got short when I lived in Rogers Park, in Chicago. I kept going to the same hair salon at the end of my street. They didn't really speak English there, but they were so convenient, and only $15 for a cut! I'd walk in and make snipping gestures with my fingers, and someone would cut my hair. It kept migrating shorter and shorter, but it always looked fine, so I went with it.


The growing-out process was ugly and awkward. It required barrettes and clips, and regular attention, and on since I was also increasingly pregnant and therefore FAT it nearly reduced me to tears on several occasions when I caught sight of me in the mirror. But we were almost there. Nowhere near a ponytail, but almost to where I could tuck it behind my ears and forget about it. And then I had Zoe.




It's been three and a half months now since I've had time to even think about my hair, much less visit my stylist. My transitional haircut is now a long transitional haircut. There are numerous different lengths on my head, and the ends all flip out erratically. I still don't do anything more than washing and combing, and not even every day.

Thank you, Cindy for making my day - but it's not a hairstyle. It's just hair.


Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 31, 2009 at 6:06 AM

    Love your attitude!

    ReplyDelete
  2. JennetOctober 31, 2009 at 10:50 AM

    Thanks, Pen!

    I've been admiring your blog - such a great artistic eye and I envy the food...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IDRS 2014 - Day Two and OUT

I'm writing my Day Two report while all of my colleagues and friends, new and old, are well into their Day Three experience.  I was terribly sad to leave NYC, and IDRS.  In past years I've found myself sort of oboe-ed out by the third or fourth day, but I was nowhere near that point last night when I had to begin my schlep to the airport.  On the up side, I am home and spent the morning with Zoe and Steve, and I'm safely on the correct side of Lake Michigan well before my concert tonight, which was the important purpose of my travel plans - but there are SO MANY MORE great events happening at NYU.  Best of luck to everyone performing! Yesterday, among other performances, I enjoyed THREE recitals featuring music for oboe and bassoon.  Be prepared for a husband-wife recital coming down the pike in the next year or two, as I loved much of the new music that I heard.  First I enjoyed hearing ToniMarie Marchioni and two of her colleagues from the University ...
4 comments
Read more

Practice+ App - and my FIRST EVER GIVEAWAY

You know how, when you are practicing, you need to have your metronome on your stand and turn it constantly up and down as you work through a technical passage?  And you also want to play in tune, and make sure you are staying consistent with your pitch.  So while your metronome is clicking away on your stand, you also have to turn half-way around to look at the screen of the big tuner which has to be plugged into the wall because it eats batteries otherwise.  And if you also want to record yourself to listen to your progress, you have to have your laptop on with the big mic plugged into it, and that’s on still another surface, so you have to move your stand around so you can orient to all three, and then your giant stack of music-in-progress falls off the stand and onto the floor and out of order and the next ten minutes are spent not practicing at all but just trying to return to normalcy. Does this sound familiar? I was sent a free promo copy (full disclosure) of an...
4 comments
Read more

Beauty of Sound

In our dress rehearsal Saturday afternoon, the conductor did exactly what I often do to my students - he asked the violins to play more beautifully, and they did.  He didn’t tell them how, or give them a flowery expressive speech, he just asked for more beauty of sound, and they immediately gave it to him.  To a great extent the sound we produce is set, based on our equipment and the shape of our mouths and our bodies - but it can be altered, too.  Adjustments in reeds and instruments can go a long way, but the key change we can make is in our own minds. I don’t know how to explain it physically, but if you determine the sound you want to make you can produce it.  Or at least you can lean in and approach it.  This is something I’ve been paying a lot of attention to lately in my own playing.  As I prepare the Saint-Saëns Sonata to perform on our Oboe Studio Recital (tonight at 7 - details HERE ), my approach is largely about beauty of sound and vibrato....
7 comments
Read more