I grew up in Overland Park, a suburban and very affluent area of Kansas. My Mom and I, however, were not wealthy. We lived in about the only
apartment complex in Johnson County, situated in a strip mall intersection, just a stone’s throw away from large brick homes with neatly
landscaped lawns.
At thirteen, I felt like an outsider amongst my peers because I didn’t wear the right clothes and my parents didn’t drop me off
at school in their new Beamer. I rode the big yellow school bus with a few other goober heads, which was almost as torturous as being badly
dressed in my hand-me-down clothes from JC Penney.
Up until the sixth grade, I wasn’t teased or ridiculed by my schoolmates. They basically ignored my existence. I was painfully shy and
skilled at the art of remaining invisible. I sat in the back row of class,
burying my face beneath a veil of frizzy hair. In the seventh grade, some girl actually asked me if I was new to the school. I, of course
said no, as I wasn’t new, and I had in fact gone to school with her for the past two years and was in many of her classes.
Anyway, my invisibility status changed one fateful night in 1983.
It was the night of my first Junior High dance that my classmates were introduced to the new me. I don’t know why I wanted to go to the
stupid dance, as I certainly didn’t have a date, and the friends that I did
have were in the same predicament as I. They too felt that walking
into that gym alone was just another ugly reminder of their geek status at school. Somehow, I thought that perhaps my luck would change that
night. I would be standing against the wall of the gym all cool and ambivalent, and some sappy love song by Journey or Foreigner would begin to
play, and at that moment, Jeff Corbin, the boy of my adolescent dreams would be inexplicably drawn to me, and ask me to dance. We would
dance, he’d fall hopelessly in love, we’d go steady, and I’d make the
cheerleading squad.
Jeff Corbin was the most popular boy at school, and he happened to be the only boy taller than me at 5’11”. By the luck of alphabetical
seating, I became his science partner, and in the midst of Bunsen burners and dissected frogs, I fell into a deep crush, probably because he was
the only boy who paid any attention to me. Okay, I admit it, he paid attention to my science worksheets that I dutifully filled out, while he
flirted shamelessly with Jackie Ornstein or some other girl in class. Whenever he’d get close to inspect my horrible penmanship, I would freeze
like a scared animal caught in the headlights of a Mack truck going 70. Blood would rush to my face, my heart would race, just because he’d ask
something stupid like, “What does number 12 say?” It was if he’d asked
me my bra size. I couldn’t even respond in a normal way. I would stammer, turn beet red and inevitably start to
perspire at the slightest
attention from Jeff. Anyway, I digress.
It was the night of the big shindig, and my Mom had splurged on a new outfit from “Fashion Gal” for me. I put on the pink fuzzy angora
sweater with the pink plaid pleated skirt, and pink Mary Jane’s, and walked
into the bathroom to see how it looked. To say the least, I was very displeased with the image looking back at me in the mirror. I looked
like a seriously overgrown five-year-old with long frizzy hair and a make-up job reminiscent of Dee Snider in Twisted Sister. I dimmed the lights
to reflect the lighting in the gymnasium, but it was no use. I would never attract Jeff Corbin looking like this. I needed a new wardrobe,
a makeup artist and some good hair care products. None of these options were available to me in the thirty minutes I had left to perfect my
look, so I took matters into my own two hands.
What came next would haunt me for years. The results were more disastrous than Delilah’s butcher job on Samson. As you can probably guess by
now, I decided to play hairdresser. I don’t know what came over me as I lifted my grandmother’s sewing shears to my head and lopped off one
large chunk of hair. The crunching of the scissors as it sliced through my hair lulled me into a dreamlike stupor. I couldn’t stop chopping.
Hell, there was no way I could turn back anyway once the first chunk was gone lying helpless and frizzy on the bathroom floor. I continued on
my disastrous mission, cutting haphazardly until I had about an inch and a half of hair on my head, with the exception of one long strand on
the back of my neck that later became my “rat tail”.
I was amazed at how different I looked with no hair. I checked out the do in every
possible angle, trying to convince myself that it looked good, but my thoughts kept returning to all the girls at my school who had cute straight
bobs, perfect clothes, and social ease. With the wilting confidence of a death row inmate on his way to
Old Sparky, I descended the stairs to
show my Mom the new do. A look of horror washed over her face, like my neck had been slashed open and I was bleeding all over the cream-colored carpeting. “I like it”, she said, “it shows off your face.” My Mom
was not a good liar, and her poor attempt at being complimentary only made me feel more miserable and pathetic.
As we drove to the dance, my Mom turned on the radio. “She’s Come Undone” by the Guess Who began to play as if it was the new soundtrack to
my pathetic life. I desperately wanted her to turn the 79 Olds Cutlass around, so I could hide for the next three years as my hair grew back,
but she convinced me to go to the dance in her usual chirpy upbeat way. “You don’t want to miss your first dance, do you? You’ll look back on
these days as the best of your life.”
As I walked into the dimly lit gymnasium to the strains of Rio by Duran Duran, I scanned the crowd hoping to find a fellow outcast. None of my
friends were in attendance, so I turned to go to the girl’s restroom to check out my new look. All of a sudden, I heard the words “Oh-my-God!”
punctuated with Valley Girl cadence. I turned to see what was so alarming, and it turned out to be me. About six or seven girls started
pointing and laughing at me like I was some kind of circus freak. As I walked away from their mocking laughter, I got more of the same reaction
from other classmates.
Without any hair, I had gone from unnoticeable and ordinary to strange and somewhat dangerous, which manifested itself
in a parting of the Red Sea effect as I walked through the crowd. I couldn’t take anymore taunting, so I sprinted to the solace of the
bathroom and locked myself into the handicapped stall. Behind the safety of
the closed door, I ran my shaking hand over my prickly head, mourning the loss of my hair. In that moment, I wanted to release all of my pain
and insecurity in a wailing howl, but the small amount of pride I still retained suppressed the cries that escaped in fits of coughing. There
were fifteen or so girls outside looking at themselves in the mirror and I knew that it would only further the abuse if I showed any sign of
weakness by crying uncontrollably. As the crowd in the bathroom dissipated, I wearily walked out of the stall, averting my eyes to avoid my
reflection in the wall to wall fluorescently lit mirrors, up the stairs, and out the front door of the school.
In the years that passed since that horrible night, I inevitably felt the inclination to cut my hair again. Three months before my ten-year
high school reunion, I cut my long hair into a similar style that I had sported the night of the dance. When I bumped into Jeff Corbin at the
bar, I barely recognized him. Gone were his sandy-colored waves and slim muscular physique. “Didn’t we have science together?” he asked
leaning in towards me flirtatiously. “I don’t know,” I said backing up. I
paused in thought, feeling a tinge of sadness for Jeff’s loss of youth and beauty. Gaining courage from my rum and coke, I blurted out, “Oh,
now I remember… Jeff Corbin, right?” He nodded enthusiastically, as if
he could magically regain the same power over me. “I hardly recognized you. Your hair is different.”
