My Life as Annie’s weekly Time Travel Tuesday question for today is:

We’ve all had them… the worst haircut or hair mistake ever! It didn’t just go away either… Travel back to that tragic day that your hair went wrong. What happened? How did you deal with the problem… did it take a long time to work it out or grow it out?

I’ve only occasionally had what I would consider a good hair today. My hair is straight, fine, limp, lifeless, and resists most efforts to do anything with it. I’ve had some success with permanents (though I have never understood why a temporary hair treatment is called a permanent…), but I also lose a lot of hair when I have one, and since my hair is thin in the first place, I don’t want to risk it becoming even thinner.

So, besides static electricity making me look like Medusa or a simple walk through the house making me look like I’ve been out in the wind, I couldn’t think of any more serious hair disasters, until I remembered one day in college…

Our school, being a liberal arts university, would have occasional Shakespearean plays or classical music concerts that students were required to attend. These were dress-up affairs and considered to be prime dating occasions. Once toward the end of my sophomore year one of my roommates and I had no dates for an upcoming play and arranged to go together. For some reason I decided to try to curl my hair with the hot curlers that were used a lot at the time. After getting all dressed and ready to go, I took the curlers out as the last thing before we left — and one got stuck in my hair. The curlers had little prongs to keep them from sliding around, and somehow those caught in one strand of hair and got hopelessly tangled. We would get demerits if we were late to the play, so we were frantically trying to get that curler out without ripping out my hair. Finally after several minutes we got it disentangled, I ran a comb through my hair, and we dashed off as fast as we could, forgetting all the dignity of the occasion, and found our seats just in time. As the house lights began to dim for the beginning of the play, my roommate turned and looked at me and said, “And it didn’t even curl!!” All that effort and frustration to no avail. All we could do was laugh.