NEWS FLASH! Our very own Hank Phillippi Ryan's novel DRIVE TIME has been nominated for an Agatha Award for best novel! We are beyond thrilled for her!! GO HANK!
HALLIE: Yesterday's discussion left me thinking about hair. One of the very first pieces of writing I ever sold was something drafted as an assignment for an essay-writing course I took at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education with the wonderful Mopsy Strange Kennedy. The assignment was: The History of My Hair.
I sold it to Only a Game, Bill Little Field's show on National Public Radio. That one success fueled me for YEARS of rejection. It's amazing how just one publisher saying YES can give you the fortitude to withstand so many NOs. And the great fun with NPR is I actually got to go into the studio and record the essay. I remember Bill telling me, "Make your voice smile!" ("Sing out, Louise!!")
So here it is -- a meditation on hair and, tangentially, all the wonderful opportunities Title IX has brought to young women.
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"I want my hair cut like that," I'd beg Mr. Latour, offering up my dog-eared third grade picture. What I wanted was a shaggy, unplanned look. What I got were bangs hacked across and sides that flipped up, giving me the dreaded Bozo the Clown look.
I tried to salvage the mess by setting my hair. Each morning, I brushed and brushed to make the hair curl under. In the afternoon, I'd be standing out in right field during one of the pick-up games I'd wheedled my way into. I can still feel my socks scrunched halfway down inside my Mary Janes. If I ran my fingers through my hair, I'd realize that my perfect pageboy had erupted and just then, the fly ball with my name on it sailed past.
When I was twelve, someone invented the bubble. You had to back-comb your hair into tangled clumps, then smooth it into one massive hair ball. Waves of hairspray turned the spun confection rigid. Sometimes we added a guiche -- this is French for spit curl. But we used clear nail polish, not spit, to glue down the curl.
I got a bubble the same year I won Best Sixth Grade Girl Athlete. Only Sixth Grade Girl Athlete was more like it. That year, I spent lonely afternoons shooting hoops. I'd be aiming a tired volleyball, imagining the clean arc that would take it whooshing through the hoop, when I'd have to drop the ball to hold down the hair mats that were flapping up and down in a sudden gust of wind.
My daughter gapes at my school picture. She thinks I personally invented big hair. The French word for this, she informs me, is choucroute. And in that photo, it does look as if I've got a perfect mound of s
auerkraut on my head.My daughter keeps her hair sensibly restrained in a pony tail as she streaks up and back on the soccer field or anchors the 4X4 relay. When I tell her she gets her athletic ability from me, she does a double take. "You?" I dig out my Best Girl Athlete award. She eyes it skeptically. "So what teams were you on?"
"There were no girls' teams back then," I tell her, "unless you count cheerleading. But still, I played. A little baseball. A little basketball. And I think I could have been really good if it hadn't been for my hair."
---
That was it. It took a minute and a few seconds to read on the radio and my career was launched -- in my mind. Which is where it mattered.
So what are your memories of sports as a kid -- were there any, and did you play or watch fro the sidelines?
17 comments:
Hey, wait--my school participated in the GAA (Girls Athletic Association) in the Big Hair Days. I was even on my school's varsity hockey team that competed for the state title (and lost), and I have the varsity letter to prove it (no sweater to sew it on, alas).
But I'll admit that the boys' sports got the big bucks. Our football team was state champion in each of my four high school years.
GAA! I'd forgotten the name of it! Thank you, Sheila!
I confess, by high school I'd give up on sports since I was never going to be a cheerleader. I took a brief run at being on drill team, though.
Sports were not cool for girls at my high school in Brooklyn. If I'm not mistaken the girls sports org. was called Doxa, which lead to some unfortunate and rather nasty name-calling for its members - who are probably still very fit and look 20 yrs younger than the rest of us. I seem to recall being pretty good at one thing - I think it was called the broad jump? You stood in one spot and then flung yourself this rubber mat to see how far you could go. I went pretty far.
Oh, right - I remember that. Wasn't there a BROAD jump and a LONG jump (you got to take a running start for the latter.)
What I remember was girls' rules in basketball - you got three dribbles and then you had to pass it. Bizarre.
I was both a high school athlete and an editor of my school newspaper when Title IX was passed in 1972.
Recognizing the significance of it, the paper's staff did an investigative report about how much of the athletic budget was devoted to boys sports and how much to girls sports. The striking disparity should not have been a surprise, because there were hardly any sports offered for girls and we wore ratty 20 year old uniforms, but seeing the numbers in black and white rocked our football-worshiping town.
Within a few years things began to change. It was amazing.
I can't really figure out how to bring this back to hair, but the rock musical Hair had seeped into even small-town consciousness by then and its ideas emboldened us all.
Brenda B. in Maine
As someone who has worn glasses since kindergarten and who flinches when balls come toward them (I can hear my mother yelling, "Don't break your glasses!") I was never a sporty girl. At Argyle Central School, there was field hockey in the spring and fall (good, because the ball stayed low) and volleyball in the winter (bad, because of the glasses thing.)At Liverpool HS, I didn't do any sports, but we had wonderful gym classes like kayaking and square dancing. (I'm wincing as I type that last, but really, it was fun.)
Now I look at my daughter and her friends, almost all of whom participated in HS sports, and I read the newspaper headlines about the various girls' teams, and I can watch collegiate and professional women's athletics on TV. What a wonderful new world Title IX ushered in.
Julia, another eyeglass wearer here, from second grade on. At our Catholic schools there were no girls' sports except for basketball, drill team, cheerleading, and gymnastics (after freshman year).
My "sport" was to walk home from school with my nose in a book without falling in the street or getting run over. :-)
Oh, and hair: my mother tortured my sister and me with Spoolies every night for years. In high school I tortured myself with sleeping on giant rollers, and never quite getting the "flip" to actually do more than lie there limply. Thank heavens for blow dryers.
Spoolies!! I remember ads on TV for those. Wasn't it a fancy of doing a pin curl, which I confess I'm old enough to have experienced (X 2 bobbypins over the curl to hold it in place) back in the day of the pageboy.
Yep. That's exactly what they were, Hallie. The plus side of them: they were soft enough to sleep on comfortably.
Photos: http://thegloss.com/beauty/spoolies/
Great essay, Hallie.
I went to an all girl's school and we had all kinds of sports. I was enthusiastic and made the teams but always as the last person sent in one someone twisted her nakle.
Ironically I was a really good tennis player, but in big matches my nerves got the better of me. But the time I wss fifty I had learned to control my nerves. If only I'd learned thirty years earlier, I'd have turned pro!
Girl's basketball. Yeah. Only forwards could shoot. Whatever. Like that would matter.
The whole high school sports experience for me was a disaster. Hideous, horrible, and a showcase for my lack of coordinaton and skill. I stunk at everyting.
We had to work out (although it wasn't called that) to a terrible record (remember?) called Chicken Fat. Which still haunts me.
Argh argh argh.
In happier news, thanks you so much for the Agatha good wishes. I am floating.(Which might have helped me in high jump.)
Me, too, Karen in Ohio and Julia. xoxo
Rhys, I can imagine you on the court - a gazelle! Have you and Jan ever played? She's a maniac tennis player.
Frist I have to say, no one told me about the clear nail polish. No wonder my spit curls never worked.
As for sports, it was modern dance and archery. No teams, just practice. But I loved it.
The school had cheerleading, twirling, and girls tennis. I think that was it back then.
I loved this! I had a double problem from Grade 4 onward. First, I wore bifocal glasses. Don't ask me why, for a short time it was considered the thing to do. Consequently I never spoke to boys until after high school graduation when I got my contact lenses! I always looked like I was either looking at the ground or looking down my nose.
My second problem was my hair. Thick as sheep's wool, determined to go its own way, it generally looked like a bush on my head; I'm surprised no birds tried to make a nest in it.
I guess this might be a third count but it's related to the glasses. I was not allowed to partake in any sports for fear of my glasses getting broken and my parents couldn't afford to replace them. The other side of this was that when I did try to play sports, the bifocals interfered with my vision so that I couldn't tell exactly where the ball was, plus being freaked out already by my parents. So I was the one who was never chosen or last to be chosen all the time.
Between the thick unruly hair and the bifocal glasses, shyness and agony of not being accepted took over. When the beehive look took over in high school I thought I might have a chance to improve my position in the rank of girls. Hah! My "crowning glory" refused to budge, even unwinding the back-combing! My future sister-in-law was training for hairdressing several years later and was determined to calm my hair down but it just sprung right back. Now I would give anything to get that hair back! Now retired, my hair is very fine and very much missing, I've lost so much I still can't believe it. And so it goes, is anyone ever completely satisfied with their looks?
I was so sure through all those high school years that I would never be married, but hey! Sometimes a change in attitude makes for a better person. I did marry, had 3 children and now 4 grandchildren, am retired with my husband in a beautiful location in northern B.C. Sometimes good things happen.
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