Warning: mangled frizz ahead

Talk and Tales from Coco, Optimist in Charge at The Shiny Butter Blog

10 June 2025

curly hair as a metaphor

What to do when you look like Roseanne Rosannadanna

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Curly Hair as a Metaphor

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Play the hand you're dealt like it's the one you wanted.

Anonymous

Curly-headed greetings, Reader,

My mom was a hairdresser before she had me back in ye olden days of 1963.

(Fun fact: her beauty shop was right by the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and she would regularly see William Faulkner walk by. She told it to me this way, "That man always looked like he needed a haircut. I should have gone out there and dragged him inside.")

Anyhow, she cut my hair when I was young, as was a normal thing to do back then.

But when my hair (and my sister's, too) grew too thick and frustrating for our mom she turned the job over to another hairdresser.

I suppose she knew to pick her battles.

You see, my sister and I had heads full of what I've called "the mangled frizz of the '70s."

Below is the poem where I first uttered these words:

*Published in Kakalak Literary Journal, 2021*

The way it was

First of all, no on knew in those days not to brush curly hair, so we brushed and brushed and brushed that mess.

It would be glossy at first but then came the frizz. And the VOLUME.

We tried Prell once—it was supposed to give thin hair volume. I don't know what we were thinking—we could barely get out of the bathroom with all that volume.

Second, hair care was simple business back then. Cuts were basic, basic, basic. Styles were limited. And as for products, we had Dippity Doo and Aquanet, yay.

I wanted California girl hair, like Malibu Barbie.

Or at least a cute cut like Dorothy Hamill's.

I tried combing my hair straight when it was wet—I was sure it would stay that way, giving me a Dorothy Hamill cut... more or less.

But nooooo, my would fill with air as it dried and expand like a science project.

And third, hairdressers then didn't embrace or even know what to do with curly hair. My haircuts were always choppy and blunt. Hairdressers had a sort of "I dunno" attitude.

So for many years it was either long hair or the Little Orphan Annie look for me.

A savior is born

Enter Vidal Sassoon.

Sometime in the late '70s Vidal Sassoon shared his gospel of, "If you don't look good, we don't look good."

I watched those commercials like angels were flying around the TV.

Sassoon had a special new shampoo, conditioner, and a "finishing rinse," for one thing. Voilà, options!

But it was his pitch that a good cut could make my hair look good that had me hooked. And he was out there training other hairdressers to cut hair the way he did.

This sounded like Jesus-talk to me.

Soon, of course, the '80s arrived, and big hair, as we all know, was IN.

Perms were IN.

People were paying to have hair like mine!

Brave... or brash?

So armed with Vidal Sassoon's words in my head and my born-this-way hair, I became bold.

I started asking hairdressers to give me a good cut in the first place... Vidal Sassoon-style, because I wasn't planning to fix their haircut. (The nerve, right?)

And mostly they did. They worked with me when I told them that I didn't want to blow-dry my hair or spend a lot of time fixing and styling. They got me.

To this day I pretty much, with a little help from some gel for all that frizz, just wash and go.

But one day a hairdresser pointed out that the underside of my hair was straighter than the pieces near the front. She offered to perm that area for me. I declined.

But I knew it was my last time in her chair.

She didn't get me.

She didn't get that I accepted my hair, weird parts and all... Thick, curly, unruly, often frizzy, unpredictable, and what-do-you-know—inconsistent, too, no surprise to me.

Embrace your mangled frizz

If I've done nothing else so well in my life, the one area I've learned to "Let go and let God" is with my doggone hair.

I suppose I didn't have that particular fight in me—to battle with my mind-of-its-own hair. I really didn't.

But WHAT a lesson, really...

Turn whatever is your "mangled friz" of the moment into an asset.

Or at least just throw your hands up and go with it.

Do like my mom and pick your battles—life is definitely too short to fight all of them.

Thanks for being on the other side of the screen today

Stay shiny, my friend, and embrace your mangled frizz.

I appreciate you very much,

Coco

p.s. Heads up, I'm adding more books to the Shiny Butter Book List in the next few days.

also p.s. I'm having a really good summer sale on coaching and will have that info in next week's email. Contact me here (or reply to this email) if you want to talk about that before I email about it.