Move over, Billy! Here comes Barbara!

I've been thinking a lot about my hair lately.

I know that sounds vain, but really, it's not. I'm just wondering what on earth to do with it. Ladies, you know what I'm talking about.

For starters, it's semi-long, reaching just below my shoulders. I kind of like the length, but I'm not afraid of cutting it off, either. In fact, I've had just about every kind of haircut known to man, and a few that I swear the hairdressers made up along the way. Just a year before my wedding, one gal cut it so short that if I dyed it white blonde and put a bunch of waxy-looking crud in it, I would have rivaled Billy Idol in the punk-look department. (Thank goodness it grows really fast. Would have given a whole new meaning to White Wedding.)

For another thing, it's changing color. My hair is dark, but I've got this very cool sort of Bride of Frankenstein thing going, with big shocks of white here and there, and then the requisite threads of white throughout the rest. I'm not worrying about that. I could color it, I suppose, and I certainly did that for years, but ever since I was a kid and glued myself to the TV watching The Big Valley, I swore that I would be Barbara Stanwyck when I grew up. That was one seriously magnificent cloud of silver hair! So I finally gave up on Preference by L'Oreal and have been going with Moosebane by Mother Nature ever since. So far, so good.

The problem is that as I get older, my hair gets drier and frizzier, which I hate. I've tried every product out there that boasts the ability to banish frizz. No luck. I drink water by the gallon. I have wonderfully soft, supple skin, but my hair is a wreck. It doesn't help that my white hair is somewhat wiry and difficult to smooth. Also, my hair is neither straight nor curly. It's very, very wavy, and you just try to find a good haircut for uber-wavy hair. Go ahead. Try. I've been searching for years.

I own two straighteners, four or five different sets of curlers, hot rollers, curling irons, crimping irons, you name it. It's all time-consuming and more trouble than it's worth. Fixing my hair takes forever, and I like to sleep too much to get up an extra half-hour early just to fuss with it. So I usually wash it and let it dry, sometimes adding a little mousse or styling lotion or some sort of oily stuff to control the frizz (doesn't work), and I end up looking like I did nothing at all. Sometimes when I'm feeling really ambitious, I wash it the night before, then straighten it in the morning. Again, no real difference.

So, I guess I'll have to go back to the hairdresser, hand her pictures of Billy Idol and Barbara Stanwyck, and tell her to do anything it takes to make me look a whole lot more like her than like him. I may even take a picture of the Bride of Frankenstein. Couldn't hurt!