Winging It

I'm getting old. I didn't believe it - or I was in a great denial place - until Friday, when fashion reruns finally caught up with me.

Truth be told, I supposed, I've been building to this for eight months. It all started when I went to another salon for a day of beauty and came out with what was supposed to be a very chic cut. It had a lot of layers, and I have long hair. So, the first six weeks were okay. Then it was time to go in again. I went back to my regular stylist.

Like a good customer, I readily admitted my digression, hoping he'd forgive me. It had been a full day of beauty. They were supposed to cut my hair, I tried to explain. He examined the results rather critically, finally holding up a hunk of my hair - which is really long - in the back. My stomach turned. It was only a few inches long. "What did she do here?" he asked.

I think she was trying to be nice and take off some of the weight of my thick hair. That's the generous answer.

Still, I felt like the kid who'd cut her hair with her school scissors. And, like that kid, I've waited since March for my hair to grow. I'm kinda attached to my long hair, and my hairdresser knows this. He waited until the guilty clump of hair had grown out long enough to ask the dreaded question: "Should we clean up all of these layers?"

This meant taking off about three inches of my hair. I gulped and then agreed. I'd been cursing that same hunk of hair for more than seven months now. I felt like I'd paid my penance for straying from my hairdresser.

Jim did a great job with my hair. He cleaned it up beautifully. He offered to style it a little differently for me, my hair being so much shorter now. I gleefully agreed. I love it when someone plays with my hair, and this particular "do" meant hairspray, a curling iron, and lots of turning and finessing. Usually, he does my hair with a blow dryer and a brush. It's that straight. Getting the curl to stay in takes, well, a really long time.

When all was said and done, he turned me around, and....there they were. Gentle, far more modern, but nevertheless there: wings.

I gulped, but I have to admit, I kind of like them. They are so much better than the ones I had in high school. Did anybody else have these? Just remembering the amount of hairspray it took to keep them flying off at the edges makes me giggle and cringe at the same time.

So, now I'm wing girl again, able to leap tall buildings with a single flap of her hair. And just between you and me, I don't think they look so terrible, which makes me wonder if I'll be repeating the "blonde" (read orange) hair dying phase I went through my senior year. My hair may be about to become far more interesting than its been in years. But if I start sporting a striped pair of pants and a thigh length bulky sweater - a look that never really worked for me - it'll be time for a fashion intervention. Until then, I'm flapping off to try a few other fashion adventures.