[New post] Far From a Pixie, I’ll Still Take the Cut
pamkirst2014 posted: " pixie, also spelled pixy, in the folklore of southwestern England, tiny elflike spirit or mischievous fairy dressed in green who dances in the moonlight to the music of frogs and crickets. Its favourite pastimes are leading travelers astray and frighteni" Catching My Drift
pixie, also spelled pixy, in the folklore of southwestern England, tiny elflike spirit or mischievous fairy dressed in green who dances in the moonlight to the music of frogs and crickets. Its favourite pastimes are leading travelers astray and frightening young maidens. Pixies also delight in rapping on walls, blowing out candles, and playing in water.
---https://www.britannica.com/topic/pixie
It's an ill wind, of course, that blows no good, and there HAVE been a few good things that have emerged from the pandemic. Rethinking how we do meetings is one of those. I have become a convert to Zoom, which eliminates travel time and encourages focus on topics at hand (although, even on Zoom, there is the temptation to chat about things unrelated to the urgent business that needs to be discussed. It's just that, when those chats happen, EVERYBODY on the call is privy, which, for most people, curtails their most egregious sharing impulses…)
Zoom cameras are truth-tellers, too. So, this spring and early summer, I would bounce out of bed in the mornings, merrily blow dry my hair into what seemed to be smooth, sleek, submission, and then go to work and Zoom.
And I would have to see myself and my hair, which was NOT sleek: by then, it was a wild mop of frizz, and the back, which I'd thought I had coaxed into a sweet under-tuck, was flipped up in the weirdest way.
After a long stint of missed appointments due to the COVID shutdown, my haircutter, Don, and I had decided to let my hair grow into a bob.
A few months of avoiding my image on Zoom were enough to convince me that was a wrong-headed (a sadly apt term, in this case) plan.
I went searching on the internet for short cuts suitable to Women of a Certain Age.
And what I landed on, in a post called something like The 5o Best Short Cuts for Women Over 60! was a pixie cut.
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A pixie cut! When I was growing up, my good friend who had three sisters (and one brother; their family structure was the exact inverse of mine). Just before the end of school, when the weather began to grow hot, my friend's mother would take all the girls to the beauty parlor and all of them---including the mom—got pixie cuts.
Their hair was so cute! And it was so easy! If we went swimming, say, it would take my thick long mop of hair hours, truly, to dry. My friend and her sisters would have cute dry heads by the time we peeled the papers off our popsicles on their front porch. And lets don't even talk about shampooing---we had neither a shower nor a hair dryer when I was a child, so head-washing took extreme planning. I had to shampoo right after dinner, basically, and then rub, rub, rub with a towel before air-drying for hours, so that I would not have wet hair to go to bed.
Every KNEW, back then, that going to bed with wet hair would cause something called St. Vitus Dance. I had never known any victims of this much-invoked affliction (maybe because so many of my friends had pixie cuts), but I knew for sure it was BAD.
I never got my pixie cut as a child, and as I grew into high school age, long, straight hair was the vogue, and I wore mine long, long, long. And I saved my babysitting money to buy a handheld hair dryer to use in our new house that, thankfully, came equipped with a shower head.
That was that for a while; all I had to worry about was keeping my split ends under control.
And then---adulthood, and dilemmas about what hair style was attractive, what was easy, what looked professional. I had punk-short hair. (That was not a choice, exactly; I asked the haircutter for a layered cut, and the next thing I knew, ten inch hanks of hair were hitting the floor. She turned me around to face the mirror, and my locks had become bristles.
I stared in silence.
Finally, "Is that too short?" she asked.
I looked at her in shock. "What if I said 'Yes'?" I asked. "Could you put some back?"
She giggled brightly, brushed crunchy little hair nubbins off my neck, and told me what I owed her.)
I grew that hard punk-rocker look out to a softer shoulder sweeping length with bangs, and thus set out on a lifetime of back-and-forths.
I'm sick of this; let's cut it OFF, I'd say. And a few months later, I would decide to grow it out again.
And then I'd remember the ease of shorter hair…
Years passed. My hair grew and disappeared and grew again.
All of that, of course, was pre-Zoom, before the time when I had to look at what my own hair was doing to me behind my head.
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The pixie cut picture was number three out of fifty; I didn't even look any further. The woman of a certain age sporting it looked wonderful; she had glasses, as I do, and a little bit of a paunchy under-chin; her face had laugh lines. But the short cut was just right. She didn't look like she was denying her age; she looked both put together and ready for anything.
I downloaded the picture to show Don when I went to see him in two weeks, which seemed an awfully long time to wait for my pixie cut.
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While I was waiting, I got to wondering about the pixie cut and where it started. I've been re-watching with Mark, and with Jim, who is watching for the first time, Downtown Abbey, and we are in the 1920's, when Edith has had her hair bobbed. It made me think about women's hair and changes through the eras, and I went looking for the history of the pixie cut.
I found, on my old buddy Wikipedia, that the first real trend toward short hair in women was in France (that pacesetting nation) in the early 1800's—a reaction, no doubt, to the end of the Revolution and all the changes it wrought. Some women began to wear a style called the Titus that was inspired by the shorn locks of women destined for the guillotine.
It's probably not a big surprise that the Titus didn't get much traction. Long hair still ruled the day.
Short hair crops up again, as noted, in the 1920's. Edith Crawley's bob is quite respectable, but the flappers made the short bob a political as well as a fashion statement, a liberation of women from the toil of long, long hair.
But the bob didn't really last, either; in the 1930's and 1940's, long hair for women became, again, the fashionable thing.
And then, in the 1950's, Jean Seberg and Audrey Hepburn got PIXIE cuts for their roles in movies (I really need to re-watch Roman Holiday), and the style roared right through the 1960's (think Twiggy, Goldie Hawn, and Mia Farrow), liberating lots of women and girls—just like the ones in my friend's family.
Princess Diana, Halle Berry…the list of pixie-headed trendsetters soars right up until these times, when Zoe Kravitz sports a pixie cut on the red carpet.
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Don looked at the picture of the serene older woman on my phone, nodded, and picked up his scissors.
When it was all over, when my hair was dry, Don showed me how I could either blow it out or just kind of scrunch it up with a little gel on my hands and let it dry. He turned me toward the mirror. I put my glasses on and sighed.
"SO much better," I said.
Don sighed, too, and smiled.
"You have good hair," he said. (And that is the second reason I like Don the haircutter, right after the fact that he's a hair genius with reasonable prices. He thinks my hair is GOOD hair. After a lifetime of haircutters who have shampooed my crowning glory, rinsed it out, and said to me, disapprovingly, "You have a LOT of hair," it's awfully nice to hear a hair expert APPROVE of my mop.)
Pixies, the Encyclopedia Britannica tells me, are tiny, mischievous, sprite-like faeries. And, oh, that is not me—not tiny, not be-winged. But I got my new do on a Friday; on Monday, I Zoomed.
And, my, my, my: my hair looked so much better, doing just what it was supposed to be doing, front, sides, and back. And that after a simple five minute morning method, a workout at the gym, and wet, hair-frizzing weather.
I am earthbound. I am weighty. I am far from a delicate sprite. I am certainly not in the glamorous leagues of Audrey Hepburn or Halle Berry. And I may have had to wait 60 years to get it, but oh, I like my pixie cut. This just might be my keeper style.
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