Day 29 of our 31 Letters Literacy Project is about SOMETHING YOU’LL NEVER DO AGAIN!

Today’s letter is inspired by a photograph I found of me at… oh, 14 or so, with a bad, bad, bad haircut.  I thought I had erased that phase from my mind.  No.  The photo came back to haunt me.

As a child or teenager (or even older), did you ever do something you totally regretted… like cut your hair?  Why not turn that regret and/or remorse into a letter to your kids or grandkids or a special child in your life!  Go on!  Add photos if you have them… just for the pure fun of it!

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This is my NEVER AGAIN! letter to my grandkids:

March 29, 2011

Hi, my little darlings! I’m going to tell you about something I totally regretted doing the very second I did it.  And to make matters worse, I had to wait over a year to make it even a tiny bit better!  Can you guess what it was?

Hmmmm.  It wasn’t anything BAD.  Well, not BAD to anyone else.  BAD to me, though!

OK.  Here it is.  I went from having hair like THIS…

… to THIS (that’s me in the yellow top with “the hair cut”…

… in one snip.  Well, maybe several snips.  OK.  Lots and lots of snips.

Yes, I cut my hair. Or, more accurately, I had my hair cut.

It was the summer of 1967.  A model from England named Twiggy was the greatest phenomena to hit my young life… and I wanted to look just like her.  It seemed that everyone I knew wanted to look just like Twiggy.  She was famous for her very skinny body, short skirts, her long eyelashes and her short, boyish haircut.  I (and all of my friends, too) bought tons of mascara and covered our eyelashes with it… the blacker, the better!

We tried to wear short skirts, but there was a dress code at my high school and girls were sent home if skirts were more than 3 inches above our knees.  Lots of girls left their homes in the morning with “normal” length skirts and rolled them up at the waist when out-of-sight of parents.  I never did this.  Never.  I couldn’t imagine my parents getting a call to come pick me up from school for breaking a rule.  (Although… I did wear culottes to school when I was a senior, which was against the rules.  And I did get stopped by my principal in the hallway and brought to his office.  But I managed to convince him that culottes were more appropriate and lady-like than skirts, and he didn’t call my parents.  Culottes are very wide pants that look like a skirt!)

But what I DID do to be totally, awesomely fashionable like Twiggy (besides the mascara) was CUT MY HAIR.

I did this hair-cutting thing at the end of the summer of 1967.  I went to a hairdresser near my home.  I was nervous because I loved my long hair, but I had thought about it all summer.  All summer long, I looked at Twiggy in magazines and thought about how perfect she looked.  I’m still nervous thinking about it RIGHT NOW because it turned out to be a BIG mistake!

I remember sitting in the hairdresser’s chair.  The hairdresser was a man.  I think I even remember his name… maybe it was Bruno.  I’m not entirely sure.  I told him what I wanted.  He didn’t try to talk me out of it.  He just smiled as he picked up his scissors and snipped. Hair began to fall all around me.  I may have panicked.  Yes, I probably panicked.  I didn’t like the feeling of seeing my hair fall all around me in long strands of snip.

He cut one side shorter than the other.  Just like Twiggy.  He cut the back very short.  Just like Twiggy.  He smoothed one side behind my ear.  Just like Twiggy.

But I didn’t look like Twiggy.  I looked like Sharon with short hair.  No more ponytails.  No more flip at the ends.  No more teasing the top so it went way up over my wide hairbands.

I knew instantly that I had made a very, very big mistake.  First, my hair is naturally curly, so it never, ever stayed down and straight and behind my ear like it was supposed to.  Second, it took so much more time to take care of than long hair.  Third, I hated it (yes, I know hate is a strong word, but I hated it).  And worse, I knew it would take a long, long time to grow my hair back to where it was.

It was awful.  AWFUL.

BUT… I got through it.  I was still me under that awful hair.  And I learned a pretty good lesson, too.  Although it’s fine to admire a new fashion or style, don’t do anything drastic.   I should have stuck to the globs of mascara… at least I could wash it off each night!

It did take 2 whole years before my hair grew all the way back to where it was before I had it cut like Twiggy’s.  And, to this very day, I have never done anything drastic like that again.  This girl learned her lesson of NEVER AGAIN!

(Oh… I do want to tell you that my parents approved of my culottes and were very proud of me for stating my case to my principal!)

Love forever and ever,

Grandma Couto

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Mail Tidbit of the Day: A “forever stamp” is a United States postage stamp that is valid for first-class postage no matter when it is used.  Today’s “forever stamps” cost 44 cents and can be used FOREVER.