Chop Shop

Remember when Meg Ryan was still "America's Sweetheart"? She had that great little hair cut that was all short and layered and choppy and adorable. I tried no less than three times to emulate that cut. As it turned out, I hated it on me. It gave me weird helmet hair making me look less like cute You've Got Mail Meg Ryan, and more like Steel Magnolias Sally Field. It didn't and still doesn't help that I know very little about what to do with hair. I can braid and brush and ponytail, but that's about it.

Recently, after watching a Norah Jones video about pirates, I have been thinking the time has come to cut my hair. Like, really, cut my hair. The kind of hair cut that is so drastic that people can't even say if they like it or not because they are taken aback by my shear guts. (no pun intended on the shear, things just work that way sometimes). I have been eyeing one of these dramatic haircuts since the summer when I flipped through it in a Real Simple issue at my mother's house, but know that I had my brother's wedding, I left my hair alone.

But we all know that that day has come and gone and my day had arrived. Last night, while Dan and I were at the gym, I turned to him and said, "I am going to cut off all my hair tomorrow."

He said, "Good for you, but we need to make a deal that you can only have one day to cry about it after it is done." I thought that was fair.

Today, before losing my nerve, I headed to (my neighbor is going to be sooooooooo appalled) Fantastic Sam's which is this crazy, schwa hair place that I like to go to on Wednesday's because of their "Wacky Wednesday" promotion of a $9 hair cut. That's right, I said $9. I don't like to pay for things like that. I would rather go out to dinner and drink a bottle of wine. It's hair, it will grow back, which is what I silently chanted to myself as I sat in the hairdresser's chair and watched her gather my hair into a ponytail and cut the whole thing off. And then she kept cutting, and cutting, and cutting, and then in the end I told her to cut a little more.

It isn't exactly what I had gone in looking for, but there are no tears here and I don't think there will be.