H is for Hairdo

 

My mom did not wear her hair in a big bubble 'do in the 60s, but it was certainly teased and poofy. She washed her hair with Prell on Saturdays, bent over the kitchen sink, and she set it with wire mesh brush rollers, each one pierced with a pink, three inch plastic spike to hold it in place. I would sometimes sit on the lid of the toilet and watch in fascination as she sectioned her wet hair and wound each piece around a roller, sometimes exclaiming when a pink spike scraped her scalp as it pierced the roller.

After each roller was precisely placed, my mom would wash MY hair in the kitchen sink, me kneeling in a chair and holding a dish towel over my eyes to keep the shampoo out. Then I got the roller treatment, only they were yellow plastic snap on rollers that were much kinder and gentler than her brush rollers and were mostly confined to the bottom half of my hair.

Next came my favorite part of Saturdays. Better, even, than Saturday morning cartoons. 

My mom set her hair dryer on the living room floor, plugged it in, and tucked all of her rollers inside the plastic cap, I loved the sound it made as the bonnet filled up with warm air, the cap crackling and popping as it inflated. Then I would sit on the floor across from her, and we would play games while her hair dried. Aggravation. Memory. Crazy 8. Go Fish. Wide World of Sports or Big 8 basketball would be playing on the tv in the background.

When her hair was dry, my mom would take out the rollers (with some ouches and an occasional swear word when she dropped one on the bathroom floor), tease her hair with a rat tail comb (a comb she loved more than her family, I firmly believe, and we were never allowed to touch it, let alone use it), carefully arrange her hair, then lacquer it with Final Net hairspray (that would be the point when I would quit watching and vacate the room). Her hair was ready for church the next morning, and with a little refreshing each morning, also for the rest of the week.

I don't remember how long she used the old hair dryer, but in the early 1980s, she graduated to going to the hairdresser once a week for a wash and set and did that for the rest of her life. And rain, hail, sleet, or snow, she never missed her weekly appointment!