HALLIE EPHRON: Last week I wrote about applying to be my local library's new Writer in Residence, and reminisced about an early piece I wrote about growing up a closet athlete in the years before Title IX funded girls' sports.
When commenters asked me about it, I realized my FIRST task, whether I get named Writer in Residence or not, is to find that piece and start building an archive of my work.
Hair (1998)
"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 boys' 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.Reading this ancient piece makes me smile. Isn't choucroute a wonderful word?
My daughter gapes at my sixth grade 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 sauerkraut 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."
I expanded the essay a few years later for an essay that was published in Elizabeth Benedict's wonderful anthology, Me, My Hair, and I: Twenty-seven Women Untangle an Obsession. (I repeat: Never throw anything away!)
Which brings me to ask, what might you have excelled at if there'd been the opportunity to learn and practice when you were growing up?
