More hair failures

Martha Plimpton was like IT after “The Goonies,” right? She was everywhere and in everything in the 80’s, and lord god did I want to be her. She was a pre-teen superhero of my desperate aspiration.

She had those short pixie cuts that I think she’s reverted back to after experimentation with Drew Barrymore locks. My mom chose my haircuts when I was a kid, and she chose the pixie cut for me several times in grade school. Atrocious. They never came out right and they hurt my already negative social status something fierce. I was lower than zero.

I remember that once my mom took us to JC Penny’s for a hair cut, trying to be thrifty, and my haircut came out so butchered that my mom had to surrender and take us back to the more expensive salon to fix my hair. Random bits stuck out all over the place. I shudder just remembering how much I was taunted for that hideous haircut. And in retrospect it wouldn’t have been so hard to fix if anyone I saw had had any skill.

I tried to Martha Plimpton it anyway. I remember seeing her in a magazine at my friend’s house, and Martha had her pixie cut parted on the right side of her head so far the line was practically drawn just over her right ear. I wanted that. I wanted to turn that bad haircut into Hollywood 80’s glam. So I tried it.

I used a similar method as the basketball hair umbrella incident. I parted my hair all the way on the right, bent over sideways to the left, and slimed half a mousse bottle over the exterior of the part to get it nice and flat.

I had the good fortune to try my new method on a weekend and wear it to my friend’s house. She asked, “What are you trying to do to your hair?” But she wasn’t actually that mean about it.

“I’m trying to look like that girl from “The Goonies.”

“Oh. It looks kinda funny.”

In the Kentucky summer heat, my coiffed hair melted under the noon sunlight. Slowly, the forced over fronds drooped to the right. It was like an ugly peacock unfolding gradually on the right side. Every so often, a layer of hair would break free and drift down by gravity’s pull to where it naturally belonged. Onion skin by onion skin, the stinky stuff fanned over, so that I had a small bush on the right side of my head and my regular flat hair on the left.

It’s a shame I didn’t have Martha Plimpton’s Hollywood stylist. I could have looked kinda cool. If you could have overlooked everything else about me that was totally lame in grade school.