It's all about the hair . . .

My astrological sign is Leo and for us Leo's it's always all about the hair. Like a lions mane. I have lots of it. Every hairdresser I have ever been to will attest to that.

Over the years I have had many different hairstyles. As a kid I had the bowl cut. Tiny bangs that made my face look freakishly long and a straight cut hanging just below my ears and around the back. My dad cut my hair. There was no rhyme or reason to why he would get it just right sometimes and not others. My guess is the amount of beer he had ingested throughout the day would determine whether I spent the next few weeks with bangs that looked like they had been cut with pinking sheers or whether I had the perfect snip.

My nickname when I was little was Barb Wire Head. My hair had a mind of its own. It swirled like looking into the eye of a hurricane on one side and stood straight up in the air at attention on the other. This made it hard to control. My mother gave up after going through a jar of "Dippity Do" and my hair still wouldn't lay flat. She put a school beanie on my head and called it a day. I got so used to wearing it I felt naked if I didn't wear it. I also spent a lot of time with my hands on either side of my head trying to mold my hair to my head or at least hold it down.

That didn't work.

So... one day my mom took me to the barber and told him to give me the works. He chopped off my hair and gave me what was called a Pixie. A cute name for what was actually a boys haircut. My hair stood up in the back like Dennis the Menace. I decided to go with it and created a whale spout on the top of my head with a mini pony tail. My name changed to Pineapple Head. Something my sister still calls me to this day. It was lovely. I would comb up a perfect square patch on the top of my head and secure it with a rubber band from the Sunday newspaper and curl it overnight with three pink sponge curlers. In the morning I would take out the curlers and hope for the best. It looked like a poodle exploded on my head, but only in a 4 inch radius smack dab on the top of my noggin. The rest had a mind of its own. I had that hair for years. Most of my grade school pictures were taken with that style.

I needed a change when I was about 12. I wanted to have girly hair. My mother told me I was on my own if I decided to grow out that "mop of whatever " sprouting from my head. Those were fightin' words to me so I grew out my hair...partly out of spite and partly because I was tired of being called a cute little boy with a penchant for corkscrew curls.

For a couple years I had pretty normal hair. Until I went to high school. I opted for a bi-level cut.

Ugly.

I am convinced that a women hating male hairdresser invented that one.

I left the bi-level/mullet behind and graduated to the ever popular Dorothy Hamill cut.

Perfect.

So perfect that I wore it like that all through high school and into my second year of college. It worked for me. I had the perfect hair for it. My hair didn't move for years. It stayed in place with the help of Super Hold Aqua Net. I loved that stuff. Then I decided to grow it out again.

I met my future husband and wanted to be sexy. Sexy for my conservative self ended up being an angled Vidal Sassoon bob. Short in the back and long in the front. That cut lasted for the rest of my college years. I woke up early every single day to wash, dry and style my hair to perfection. It was worth it.

Then I got married.

I had a baby.

My hair grew to Rapunzel lengths. I didn't have time to cut it. I didn't have time to style it. It was long and straight and pretty. Then I got a little post baby crazy when my son was a year old and decided to get a perm. I was going for low maintenance. What I ended up with was an afro. A giant afro that took up 3 feet of space. It was propped up by my shoulders. The perm took a wrong turn fast...somewhere between the actual curling process and the setting lotion. My brother-in-law took one look at me and asked me if I was wearing a wig. There was no hope for my hair. I had to cut it off. All of it. The perm had burned my hair beyond salvation. I went to another hairdresser and he turned my chair away from the mirror so I couldn't see and started chopping away ala Edward Scissorhands. My head felt really light. The lightest it had felt in years. He spun the chair around and I got my first look at the one piece of hair left on my head. It was so short I couldn't even run my fingers through it. I couldn't even comb it. I looked like G.I.Jane but worse. My husband was a little freaked out. We looked more like brothers than husband and wife. It was hideous. It lasted for about a year until it grew into the crew cut stage and I could no longer see my scalp. My husband had me sign a waiver saying that I would never ever get another perm as long as I lived. I signed on the dotted line. If perms ever become popular again I am so screwed.

Since then I have had cute short hair and stylish long hair. I've had the Rachel cut and a layered cut. I've moved from dramatic haircuts to coloring my hair over the last 10 years. I have been a blond, a redhead, a brunette and even gone black. Right now I have normal hair that is the closest to my natural color in years. I'm getting a little restless with it. It's time for a change.

Maybe I'll go back to the pink sponge curlers? Remember those? You never knew what your hair was going to look like when you took out those curlers. All the hair would turn out perfectly with all the curls coiled in little pretty ringlets and then you pulled out that last curler and it would spring the other way, like a crazy corkscrew gone mad, and no matter how much you tried to tug the curl and get it to move in the direction of all the others you couldn't.

Who knows what I'll do next...Only my hairdresser knows for sure...