Note: There is language that is excluded in the transcript but not excluded in the audio.
It was the day before Easter, 2002, and my hair was just long and raggedy, and I thought, “You know what? I’ve never had short hair before. Why don’t I go get myself a nice short hair cut?” You know, just for fun. You know, just to switch it up a bit. And I don’t know much about salons. I know Fantastic Sams isn’t, isn’t known for being high quality, but it was open the Saturday before Easter, and they had openings.
So I went on in. And the lady asked me what kind of short haircut I would like, and I said, “Oh, well, you know, I don’t know, maybe something –” I said, “Maybe a little below my ear, something like that.” And I, then I said, “You know what, you just do what you think would look good,” you know. And that was my mistake. That right there was my mistake, saying, “You do what you think would look good.”
Now here, herein lies a cultural problem. I was getting my hair cut by a lovely young Black woman, and she looked cute, and her hair looked cute. But let me explain to you, her hairstyle was that very, very short, pretty much cut almost to the head kind of fingerwave that some Black women wear, that looks very nice on a lot of Black women but I’ve never seen it on a white woman. Well, I had never seen it on a white woman, until about 30 minutes after I noticed her haircut and sat in her chair.
So yeah, that’s what happened the day before Easter. I got the shortest haircut of my entire life. Almost down to my scalp. Barely enough to do a teeny little fingerwave. And thankfully I do have thick wavy hair, so it did kind of work out that way. But yeah, I went home and cried my eyes out. I was absolutely devastated, just absolutely devastated. And it wasn’t even that it was a bad haircut for what it was supposed to be, it was just that it was not the haircut for me. It did not look good on me. It did not flatter me in any way. And of course I have — I grew up with a cruel, cruel abusive mother, so she was so mean to me the next day. Said a bunch of racist sh**, you know, just — she’s a horrible human being. So I knew I had to deal with that and face that, and of course I did.
But, but I will say though, that haircut, because it was cut basically in so many short layers, because that is what a haircut that short can only be, when that haircut grew out to about shoulder length, those layers laid so beautifully, one wave on the next wave, perfectly, that my hair — the only way I can describe it is like black hair version of Marilyn Monroe hair. Like, short, but wave on top of wave on top of wave, just gorgeous. And I have begged people since then to, like, somehow cut my hair that way, in that fashion, to make it look as good as that haircut grew out to be, and I can’t get it exactly right ever again. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going for that haircut to wait for it to grow out. But, yeah, so that was my experience.