A book that has stayed with me and the trial of getting bangs

Bangs.

Six weeks ago I tried to get bangs. The hairstylist said it was a bad idea. My bangs would split in the middle and I would be unhappy. She was sure of it. We analyzed all the ways this would make life hard. To keep them from splitting, was I ready for the work these bangs would take? How often did I style my hair now? Did I have the right brush? She told me horror stories of middle aged women whose hair had cemented into place who tried bangs and then came back to her crying, “You were right. Bangs were a flop.”

It sounded bad. All these middle aged women with old immovable hair.

”I guess we should stick with the middle part,” I said.

Then it started to rain so I sat on the bench by the front window and stared at all the passerbys who were courageously braving the rain and probably had the hair they wanted—who were not sad and bangless.

Six weeks later, I tried again. But this time I went back to my old hair dresser and said loudly, “I need bangs. I’m doing bangs. I will not be deterred.” (Speaking in threes and all in one breath is helpful when you’re desperate to be heard.) She said, “No need to get riled up. I can give you bangs.”

Boom, I thought. Bangs.

Is there a lesson here?

Get bangs the first time :)

Smile by playwright Sarah Ruhl.

In this excellent memoir Ruhl examines her relationship to illness and healing. After giving birth to twins Ruhl was diagnosed with Bell’s Palsy where one half of her face drooped and was essentially frozen.The memoir charts her search for healing through visits to every kind of doctor and alternative health practitioner as she wrestles with notions of symmetry and beauty, her feelings of shame living in a world as one who cannot smile (we like women to smile!) and even mothering babies with a frozen face (what if their empathy learning is stunted?).

She writes at the end of the book as she comes around to the value of imperfection:

I want to cherish the wrinkle that is a marker of whatever it is that makes your joy hard-won and human. A little prayer.

May all the broken faces heal.

May what appears to be broken,

actually be in the midst of an untold,

unforeseeable healing.

You Hurt My Feelings, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, about a woman who overhears her husband telling a friend how he doesn’t like his wife’s book. It’s an interesting question for me to consider as an artist. What does it mean to have friends, family, even a husband who may not always like my art—my creations? And then for all of us, what does it mean to be invested in the opinions of others? Are the little white lies we tell actually acts of care?

I should ask…do you like my bangs?

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