Splitting Hairs?

         At the risk of being called a tiresome old grouch, I would like to air my views about the current longhair craze that has made all females under fifty mere carbon copies of each other. 

Could one call it the Alice in Wonderland hair-do? Surely, it cannot be blamed on simple economics, this urge to dump all originality.  Yes, there is a large amount of dough saved in avoidance of permanent waves, but think of the fantastic cost of hair coloring (blonde is essential), cutting and straightening.  I recently met a woman of modest means who had just paid $400 to have her hair flattened out.  “Don’t tell anyone,” she told me.

Perhaps she feared the loss of her job as a paralegal unless she conformed to the fashion of her peers.  No matter that the style was extremely stark and unbecoming. She did not want to stand apart from the crowd. Little girls are the same.  Always wanting to follow the others, in dress, deportment and fashion.

I have one little great-grandchild who seems unafraid to do her “own thing.”  She has a fine head of dark, glossy hair, which she wears short, with bangs across her brow.  On the girl’s soccer team she is a standout.  During the action it is almost impossible to tell one longhaired little player from another.  Not Anna.

Her twin sister, Lily, may look like her peers as she streaks across the field, chestnut-brown hair flying, but she, too, is different.  Though less thick than her sister’s, her hair is a pride to her. In a few months, she said, it will have grown long enough to lop off enough to be used for a very important purpose: to be sent to a hospital as an aid for cancer-ridden children who have lost their hair.  What an important lesson this is to a little girl in a child-centered world, contributing, in a very tangible way, to others.

As I watched the players’ longhaired mothers on that soccer field, it occurred to me that, with a few snips here and there, a lot of little heads in a cancer ward could mercifully be covered.

Perhaps, like other fads, growing one’s hair for charity will become the “right thing” to do.  Come on, ladies, whack off some of that extra luggage. You are Delilahs, not Samsons. The walls won’t come tumbling down, and who knows, you might look a lot better, and feel better, too.