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boy, neckline, poodle cut, shag, pixie, ponytail, all of these hairstyles were
popular in the 50's, and I didn't escape any of them. I was blessed with heavy,
coarse hair. I was not blessed with the ability to keep most of these styles looking
neat and tidy on my own, save for the pixie, maybe. That required no care whatsoever,
except shampooing. Occasionally my mother got a wild hair to change my look, although
I wasn't often terribly interested in this process. She would start to home in
on me when she got home from work, slowly circling as I stood in my rumpled school
clothes after a hard day of geography, kickball and the walk home in Beaumont's
heat and humidity. She'd run her fingers through my gobs of hair muttering things
like “coarse as a horse's tail”, and “what a mess”, and “just like a yarn mop”
while perhaps looking at some hairstyles in magazines.
Mama and many other
mothers across the US got a good bit of help in corralling their daughter's manes,
namely in the form of the Tonette home permanent. It was the junior miss version
of the grown up Toni for older girls and women. I believe it was supposed to use
milder chemicals to melt, torture, burn and reconfigure hair shafts in the kiddie
set, but so far as I could tell, it smelled just as awful, itched and burned my
skin and scalp and caused my eyes to stream buckets of tears as much as the Toni
and other perms did.
The person who always gave me my permanent waves
was my Aunt Lydia, aka Aunt Pee Wee. Mama was not skilled at this, and now I shudder
to think how much worse I might have looked if she had tried. There were basic
rules concerning waves, such as, don't cut the hair until a couple of weeks after
the perm is in. Don't wash hair for a week after the perm, meaning my head smelled
like a diaper pail for a week or longer, since it didn't ever seem to wash out
the ammonia odor for weeks and weeks. The end result, on my head, at least, was
almost never poodle-ish, or Marilyn Monroe-ish, as Mama once tried to lure me
into cooperating with yet another Tonette by telling me I'd look like the famous
blonde bombshell. I ask you, what eight or nine year old girl wearing thick little
cat eye glasses, Kate Greenaway Chubbette school dresses tied in the back and
sturdy saddle oxford shoes is ever, really and truly, likely to look like a Hollywood
femme fatale?
As I said, I have always had coarse hair, and apparently
it “grabs” curling solution in about a millisecond. The directions in the box
were somewhat generalized, so my poor mane was allowed to process longer. The
extended effects on my childish locks, appearance wise, ranged somewhere between
a brand new Brillo scrubbing pad and a thermonuclear explosion, depending on the
length of my hair pre perm. The curliness, or more accurately, frizziness, from
a Tonette seemed to last about 6 months, so thereafter my hair and scalp was greased
with a sweet smelling, very thick, white paste called Vitapointe hair dressing.
There was no way to get a brush through the Big Thicket of hair do's, otherwise.
© Frances Giles
"True Confessions and Mild Obsessions"
December 2, 2012 Column
Related Topics: Beaumont
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