Hallie Ephron remembers Sandra Dee in ME, MY HAIR, AND I

HALLIE EPHRON: When I started seriously writing, I took a class in essay writing. One of our first assignments was “The History of My Hair.” So when my pal, the wonderful writer Elizabeth Benedict, asked if I’d like like to contribute an essay to an anthology about our obsessions with our hair, I enthusiastically signed up.

I took that early-early piece, along with other musings I’ve written since on the subject of my hair, and worked them into an essay I call “Remembering Sandra Dee.” It’s about how I used to cut out photos from movie magazines and beg the hairdresser to cut my hair like that. And how my aspirations for my hair probably short-circuited my accomplishments as an athlete.

 

My new essay is in stellar company in Elizabeth Benedict’s extraordinary anthology, Me, My Hair, and I: Twenty-seven Women Untangle an Obsession (Algonquin), which was just named PEOPLE Magazine’s pick of the week.

Here are just a few quotes from the essays in it;

Jane Smiley: All I knew was, the hairstyle that I chose from the styling book was called Femme Fatale. Or maybe it was Harlot.

Siri Hustvedt: We are the only mammals who braid, knot, powder, pile up, oil, spray, tease, perm, color, curl, straighten, augment, shave off, and clip our hair.

Deborah Feldman: Eventually I threw away my wigs. I abandoned the community that had forced me to wear them.

Suleika Joauad: Chemotherapy is a take-no-prisoners stylist.

Marita Golden: Black women’s hair is knotted and gnarled by issues of race, politics, history, and pride.

Anne Lamott: Dreadlocks make people wonder if you’re trying to be rebellious. It’s not as garbling and stapled as a tongue stud, say, or as snaky as tattoos.

Emma Gilbey Keller: “Your hair is so thick,” my grandmother used to tell me with a curled-lip emphasis that immediately turned the statement into an insult.

Deborah Tannen: Another woman told me that after she appeared on television standing behind the president of the United States in a bill-signing ceremony, her mother’s comment was, “I could see you didn’t have time to cut your bangs.”

Maria Hinojosa: …when I was asked to anchor my own show, I was told to tie my hair back and make its distinctiveness disappear. I think they wanted me to be a Latina Talbots model.

My essay begins:

It's 1958 and I'm ten years old, a skinny kid, all elbows and knees, a long face with big eyes under furry caterpillar eyebrows, sitting on a stack of telephone books in the chair at Mr. Latour's Beauty Salon, where my mother gets her hair done once a week. I've come here often with her, but this is the first time Mr. Latour is cutting my hair. …

“Can you cut it like this?” I ask. I show Mr. Latour a picture of June Allyson that I've cut from a magazine. She's a fresh-faced blond with short, curly bangs and a perfect pageboy.

Here’s me and the stars whose looks I aspired to imitate.

So fess up, when you were growing up, whose picture did you bring to the hairdresser, and did it ever come out the way you wanted it? Men, did you aspire to Elvis’s forelock? Warren Beatty’s mutton chops.

ME, MY HAIR, AND I: TWENTY-SEVEN WOMEN UNTANGLE AN OBSESSION goes on sale today, an original paperback and an ebook! Events in NYC this week, Cambridge MA on Oct. 5 and Wash DC Oct. 13. Check out Elizabeth Benedict's blog for more information. the sched. on my blog: http://ElizabethBenedict.blogspot. #LoveYourHair