Hair Today
Three women got on the medical building’s elevator, each with a hairstyle from a different decade.
The first one you could tell went to high school in the 80s. Her hair was a tumble of curls, swooped up and reined in with combs like the young Madonna's here..
Then my gaze fell on her daughter, who had the hair all young women have had now for ten years or more, pulled straight back in a ponytail just the way Brandi Chastain wore hers in that famous Women's World Cup game in '99 where, at the moment of victory, she pulled her shirt off in joy and showed the world her sports bra.
Remember?
I like this hair for its apparent ease and lack of artifice, even if I do sometimes wonder if the young women will laugh later in life at how sort of bare they looked, like so many shaved cats or bunnies without their ears.
I looked down at my watch then and when I looked back up a third woman had dashed onto the elevator and turned her back to the rest of us, so all I could see was long brown hair; really long brown hair that swayed this way and that.
"Now there’s a beautiful sight!" I thought to myself.
Then the woman turned and looked at us all and I saw that she was not 20, or 30, or 40, or 50. She was 60 if she was a day and this hair she was wearing was the hair she had worn in the Age of Aquarius.
Way back when I was a kid, girls went to school with hair rolled on the ends like window shades.
We liked to think it was a 'look' but really it was the best we could do with hair curlers.We all looked like we had half-lowered window shades hung around our heads.
Then, almost overnight, the revolution hit, hemlines went up a foot and hair came down and stayed down.
