Melsville

Hair Power!

In the morning, Emma has a very simple beauty regime.  I spit clean her face, and use a hair-pick to give her hair a good fip-fip-flip.  As do I, Emma has curly hair.  Curly hair just springs from our heads, and does what it wants.  All there is to do is toss it around a bit, and hope that’s enough.  Toss-toss,  and Emma and I are chugging down the sidewalk toward school.

Emma rocks short hair, but most of the girls in her class keep their hair long.  Their mothers keep it; Em’s friends arrive with braids, ponytails, barrettes, headbands, and hair combed smooth.  Somebody put real effort into these ‘dos, and I doubt it was the fathers.  In our house, it would be; if Emma wants braids,  I’ll be sending her over to Jamie.  I’m one of those Moms who says,  keep it short until she can take care of it.   As I said, Emma has the short look working for her,  so that’s good.

I don’t know that the boys I know would tell me  hair is for freedom, but it is.  It’s one up on shoving the tee-shirts their mothers like but they don’t to the bottom of the pile,  one up on keeping the button-down shirts at the back of the closet until they are well and truly outgrown.  His hair is something over which a boy has some control.  He can keep growing it until it drives someone  with scissors crazy.   It’s there, right out there, and the first instance of  It’s My Body. 

I like long hair on boys.  Love it actually.  Long hair,  skinny braids, mohawk,  dreads, hair that used to drive parents nuts looks right to me.   Buzz-cuts, now those give me the raving heebie-jeebies.    It must be conditioning I suppose; freedom-of-expression hair is what I know.   Anyone who has seen old pictures of my brother, or even my father, knows Liam comes from a line of follicle freedom-fighters. 

All that being said,  if my son were my daughter, I’d be heartily lobbying for a haircut.     It has been fourteen months  since his last haircut, so it’s grown past his shoulders, and that’s fine.  If Boyo wants it that long, he has  to start taking care of it.   He needs to get the spilt ends trimmed  then go to with a little conditioner.   And start using a comb or hair-pick, but that goes without saying.  With freedom, comes responsability.

I wish I could a picture , any picture, of my brother and I together when we were young kids.   We look like my kids, I had  this cutie-pie “pixie cut”, and Jono’s  hair cascaded past the shoulders.   Older adults asked my mother, which one is the girl?:; and acted surprised when she told them.  We all laughed it off,  my kids and I will too.

Meeting Ziggy Stardust

On a family vacation in 1982, my brother, Jonathan, slipped me something that blew up my inner world.    It was a mistake on his part, or at least a misstep.  It wasn’t exactly what  he imagined, but it worked.

While my back was turned, Jono took the tape I’d made of Tea for the Tillerman out of my Walkman and replaced it with a reggae tape of his selected songs.  It was time, he decided, to shake things up a little.  He was my brother, it was his job.

I pulled on the headphones and sank back against the pillows of the hotel bed, expecting something from the soundtrack of Harold and Maude, my first real favorite movie.   What I heard was the opening bars of “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust.”  I sat bolt upright and my hair stood on end.  After twenty-eight years, I still swear that’s almost what happened;  that’s exactly how it felt. It felt like a cartoon of surprise. ,  I rewound the tape and played the song a second time before I said anything.  What the *&%$#@ is This?  Do you have any more!!?!

Ooops,.  Jono had included that song on the tape to fill some space.  Yeah, well, he’d meant for me to hear the Toots and the Maytels , but this was good too.

Good? It was great.  My first kiss is shaky ground.  Which was the real first anyway?  This moment; that is clear as day forever.

Three months later, I was in the hippy haven that was my summer camp.  This was where, a year before,  I’d learned to give friends hello hugs,  the place where I had a boyfriend named Stephen whose brother, Larry, was my best friend.   This was the summer-camp where they screened Harold and Maude and Spare Change on movie-nights.

My second year at camp, I met Alyxx who wore all black, even in July.  She loved David Bowie just as much as I did.   She played me  songs I had not heard on the boom-box in our cabin . She was my little big dangerous friend.   After we came home from camp, we talked to each other more than once a week, and sometimes daily.  Alyxx invited me to her parties where I met and kissed cool boys.

Before Christmas break my Freshman year of High School,  I was locked in the tight  embrace of black miniskirts, enveloped by big sweaters..  I felt pretty wearing blue-green liquid eye-liner.  I sometimes carried my Walkman to school with my homemade copy of  Aladdin Sane inside.  My love of David Bowie was the first thing people knew about me. 

 I attended meetings  of the Poetry Club,  where I learned about Adrianne Rich.  My senior year, I swore to edit a magazine we never wrote.   I tried out for ( but was never cast in)  plays. I roped an unsuspecting Freshman into playing Ernest Worthing to my Lady Bracknell in a Theater class assembly.  I got kicked out of Chorus because I just plain sing badly.   People learned lots of things about me, but my love of David Bowie was right out there in front.

Why am I telling you this?  Reading a book called Fantasy Freaks and  Gaming Geeks  has made me take a longish look at how I came to this be myself.  Well, there was the being raised by transplanted Brits.    There was my education, which included five years in all-girls school.    These were happening in the 1970s-1980s, so that has to be worth something.  There’s the books I read, the things that have lead me to read Faulkner for sheer fun.   Whatever else there was, there is David Bowie; can’t leave him out.