pink tools of torture

Last week, when I wrote the poem titled Pink, a long legacy of pink hair curlers came to mind. It all started when I was eight, and my hair had finally grown out of that horrid 50s pixie cut, my mother would twist little sections of my wet hair around her finger and clip them in place with two bobbie pins forming an "x". I'll never foget catching the first glimse of myself in the bathroom mirror, in this state of total pin-headedness, brushing my teeth, thinking I looked like some kind of space alien. Was I the only one who made dancing ladies, by threading four bobby pins onto one, then twirling it for her skirt? Okay. Don't answer that.

After the pin-head stage, I graduated to the pink spooly rollers. Speaking of aliens, they were far more fun to play with than wear, since in the closed position, they looked just like pink flying saucers. I remember how they flew in the air and hit me in the face, if I flipped my head around too much.

Next came the pink sponge curlers. Even though they were like stretching my head on the rack, they were a tad more comfortable to sleep in. But for some reason, the one on my right side would invariably fall out during the night, so I would head off to school in a lopsided state. How did those girls manage the perfect flip all the way around?

The spongies were for little girls, so in junior high school, I graduated to the bed of nails pink stubbies, which were covered in prickly spikes, and pink Dippity Doo gel. (Is there some reason why both the gel and all the curlers were pink? No wonder it's not exactly my favorite color.) Some of them had clips and some were held in place with plastic lobotomy-type picks, and were like sleeping every night in an iron maiden. What a price we girls paid for beauty. But, you know, looking back at those old photos, for all the torture, my hair really didn't look that great. I thank God every day for whoever it was who invented the blowdryer. No doubt it was a woman.

photos borrowed from Google images