Hamill hair. A memoir.
Last weekend at Type-A Parent Blogging Conference, I sat in on a terrific roundtable discussion with midlife bloggers. During the course of conversation, we learned of a party that evening AstraZeneca was sponsoring to kick off Get America Moving to combat osteoarthritis.
Then someone said their spokesperson Dorothy Hamill would be there.
That’s all I heard for the next 30 minutes.
While all these fabulous midlife women discussed the empowering of 40-plus bloggers and how dare companies place age limits on who is eligible for a sponsored content, I thought of nothing but white ice skates, a pink dress and a hair cut.
For those of you born after the mid-seventies and let me play time capsule.
In 1976, I was 14 years old. Information outlets were the newspaper, the three networks and the local PBS channel which came in fairly well when the wind was blowing from the southeast at a steady 6 mph.
No internet. No smart phones. Computers where things with flashing lights and whirling discs that took up entire walls in James Bond movies.
Not that the Olympics aren’t a big deal now but back then a typical school night offered suffering through a bit of homework and a rerun of What’s Happening.
So that winter when they were broadcast on ABC, the entire world and I tuned into Innsbruck and watched a young pretty skater glide over the ice to her first gold medal.
Hamill captivated everyone from Jim McKay (Google him.), to Rocky Balboa (Who also had a very good 1976. Google him.), to a certain 14 year old hovering over a 12-inch color television tucked away in her Central Florida bedroom.
After seeing her standing on the top platform, 99.99 percent of women between the ages of five and 105 got the haircut bearing her name.
I had never worn my hair short but my father — who loved short hair — encouraged me. Why not? Dorothy was glamorous, fresh faced and beautiful. And every one loved her.
See. Who wouldn’t want to look like this?
Well, I got the cut, or a severe interpretation of one. One that had my hair jutting at a perfect right angle out the back of my head.
I got home and went back to my bathroom, stared in the medicine cabinet mirror and sobbed.
Runny red nose, swollen eyes the size of watermelons kind of sob.
I wanted movie idol, ice skater scintillating good looks and instead I appeared more of a baby bald eagle emerging from its shell.
It was not how I had imagined. No shaking my lovely locks as I skated down the halls of my junior high.
No. Just me. Only worse.
Just me with no hair and freakishly exposed neck.
Eventually, my Dorothy cut grew and my memory waned — that is until last weekend at the Westin in Atlanta when I had a chance to say what I’d been waiting to say to her for 36 years.
“Thanks to you, I spent six months of my life wearing a Farrah Fawcett wig from Spencers bobby pinned to my head.”
No, of course not.
I gushed. I told her how beautiful she was then. How lovely she is now.
I told her about me and the little 12-inch color television set sitting on my blue desk in my blue bedroom with blue shag carpet.
No sometimes it’s just enough to have the 14-year-old buried deep inside come bursting through — and remind her 50-year-old self that some people just aren’t made for short hair. EVER.
Come on. Be honest. Did you (or your mother) have the cut?
