Bad hair

This is such a fun topic and it's so easy to gather data.

My first example appears at the grocery store the other night on a shortish maleish grunge-dressed lesbian. Her hair is spiky and thin and mostly dark, about three inches long and sticking out randomly all over the place. Then she turns away! My mouth drops open as I spy a bleached chevron-shaped DA sort of configuration jutting out behind her. It is obvious she's done this without looking. I am tempted to go up to her and help: "There's this technique that you can use to look at the back of your hair..." but I do not.

Another good one is the woman I see almost daily who works in my building. She's mid- to late-fifties and has one of those hairdos that you get at a beauty parlor when you ask them to wash and set you, but in the maintenance phase. It looks great from the front but once you see her from the side there's this great comb of hair, like a standing wave, pointing backwards with a huge empty space behind it. Again I want to explain the advantages of a second mirror when grooming oneself.

I've saved the best one for last. There's this very small girl in my art class. "Waif" isn't exactly the right word but it's the first one that comes to mind.* She wears all black with huge lace-up goth knee boots. Her hair is just alarming, really. I cannot take my eyes off of it. It's big - I'd say roughly the size of a small Volkswagen. I don't know how she's holding it up as small as she is. There is an explosion of hair on either side of her head, semi-tiny-braids, semi-fright-wig, and some more coming out the back. The best way I can describe it is it looks like she's got balanced on her head sideways one of those elephant-looking creatures with dreadlock stuff hanging off of them from the first Star Wars movie. (See photo.) She also kind of looks like one of those Bratz dolls with the really big heads. Holy cow - how do you sleep on that?

* Pilfered from Chuck Palahniuk.