One late summer afternoon, after my mom had returned to her job at the high school, but before school actually commenced, my sister and I were home alone. She was a home body, and I couldn't convince her that we needed to go anywhere... well, anywhere that involved my driving.
After an afternoon of General Hospital, I hit a nerve with my entering-middle-school sister: She needed a new hair cut. I think I even offered to pay for it. Anything to drive was my motto. I drove her to the farthest away hair place I could think of. It was a walk-in only place, and we sat in the waiting room browsing through the hundreds of hair magazines. Finally, we settled on a cute little, short 'do, and Bambi called her back to "the chair".
Funny thing happened while she was in the chair (or shortly thereafter): Puberty hit and her normally straight and compliant hair became curly and wily and unruly. She came by it honestly as our daddy had naturally curly hair - it just never occurred to us that we'd have any of his wave... that is until her hair started to grow out.
It was the late 80s. We should have just gone with it instead of trying to tame it. But we didn't. We fought with it and it fought back. Picture day that year was a prime example of big hair getting bigger.
My sister was mortified. In fact, I can hear her now screaming at me to remove this picture from The Internets. If you listen very carefully, you can probably hear her too - wherever you are.
Of course, she's forgetting the big picture here: It's not that her hair looked bad. It's not that she spent her first year in middle school growing out the biggest 'fro ever to be seen on the whitest chick in a three-state area. It's that I got to drive.
She's always been self-absorbed that way.
