Ever since Rapunzel, women have been identified with their hair. It's either their pride and joy or bete noire. I remember when I was a little girl, my mother tried to improve on my hair. She would wash it in chamomile tea "to preserve the blonde," she said, but of course it was really a color rinse. When a social occasion loomed, she would wrap wet strands of my hair in strips of rags and twist and tie them in knots. Sometimes I had to sleep uneasily in rags, but next morning, when they were undone, I had ringlets. My mother would rub wet soap on a hair brush and brush each strand around her finger. Soap was an early form of hair spray.
Gradually, my hair grew long below my shoulders. When I was sixteen, I followed the fashion of wearing it up in a bun, secured by long hairpins, at the nape. In the late twenties, bobby pins hadn't been invented. Then in a reverse of fashion, all the girls were bobbing their hair, and some with straight hair were submitting to the new permanent wave machine. It was a pole on a pedestal crowned by a circular frame. Curlers attached to electric wires dangled down from the frame. In a long and tedious procedure, the hairdresser would soak each strand to be curled in a special solution and wrap it in a special packaging. Then each package was attached to the overhead electrical curler. When the juice was turned on, the heat and the chemicals curled your hair. Or frizzed it, if you were unlucky. In any case, you went around reeking of the strong solution for the week before your next shampoo. Furthermore, anyone afflicted with a touch of paranoia suffered the thought of a sudden catastrophe, earthquake in California, tornado in Kansas, fire anywhere while you were attached to the unrelenting machine.
I never had an electrical permanent, but the subject came up on one significant occasion. It was 1939, and my husband and I with our toddler daughter were living in Princeton, a few houses down the street from the legendary Einstein. Often when I was out walking with my two-year-old, we would pass him on his way to or from the Institute for Advanced Learning on the Princeton campus. Invariably, he would stop to pat Susan on the head and say something pleasant to her in German. I wondered if she might grow up to be an astro-physicist.
One evening, during that time, we went to a benefit performance at a local movie house. The show starred the beautiful young German actress, Hedi Lamarr, in her controversial film, "Ecstasy." By chance I sat next to Mr. Einstein. He was there with his sister who looked exactly like him, and both were engrossed in the Hedi performance, including the notorious string-of-pearls scene. At intermission, door prizes were awarded. After a camera and a dinner-for-two at the Princeton Inn were claimed, the last prize was a permanent wave. Mr. Einstein turned to me and asked, "Vat is datzis prize?" I said, "It's a permanent wave," and tried to illustrate with undulating hands on my head. He nodded and smiled, and pointing to his own bushy halo of gray hair, said, "I should get dat, hein?" When I told this anecdote to friends in the Science and Society study group, an ASPEC member said, "That's when someone taught Einstein a new wave theory."
Life became simpler for women with hair concerns when the electrical permanent was replaced with the "cold wave." It was vastly more comfortable and scarcely more involved than a shampoo and set. Now an improved chemical solution is applied to the curlers, and the heat provided by a regular hair drier. The results are usually far superior.
But on one occasion, I experienced the simplest of all waves, permanent or not.
It was June in the late sixties. We were in Mykonos, one of the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea. The shore, a semi-circle around a blue water harbor, was a tourist dream of little shops, stand-up bars, and tavernas with umbrella-sheltered tables on the broad cobbled pavement.
At night until late, every Mykonian, grandparent to infant, was down at the harbor, eating, drinking, parading under the stars and strings of electric lights. Mykonos, we were told, had recently been electrified. And it had also been whitewashed in honor of the visit of some important official. So everything gleamed white, including the rows of little houses that climbed the hills around the harbor. We were so dazzled by Mykonos that we stayed a week in a tourist hotel on the semicircle.
One morning, during that week, I was on my way up one of the hill-hugging streets to visit a small domed chapel that was said to display some rare Greek icons. I didn't reach the chapel because I was waylaid by a sign: Hair-Dresser, in the window of a two-room house; I went inside to make an appointment with the hairdresser whose English was French-accented, but serviceable. Madame did not have to wait. Madame could have her shampoo and set in ten or eleven minutes. I wandered around for ten or eleven minutes. When I came back, she had placed a chair for me in front of the open window. I was told to sit and stretch my neck outside the window. Then down the hill came a troop of little boys, each with a pail of cold water to pour on my head and let it drip into the street. After the shock of the first pail, my hairdresser rubbed my head with a bar of soap not much milder than Octagon soap remember it ? and the little boys kept coming with the water until she said enough. She set my hair expertly she had been trained, she told me, in Parisand then to my surprise, dragged out a portable electric hair drier to finish the job. Mykonos had electricity, but indoor plumbing had not arrived.
Now in the nineties, hair salons have gone unisex. And sometimes, sitting in mine next to a young blade with a beautiful crop of hair, watching him get shampooed, trimmed, and blow-dried in a fraction of the time it will take me to have a permanent, I think how unfair life is. Men don't have to go through what women do from child birthing to permanent waving. But the next thought is that when that young whippersnapper is old and doomed, his elderly wife will be on the phone making an appointment for her shampoo and set.
Virginia Ireland is an educator, playwright, and contributor to professional journals.
