Tag: susan Sarandon

Peace. At Last

I was as bald as an onion when I was born. And when I finally did grow hair it was platinum and straight. That all changed …. well …. I don’t know exactly when, maybe about when I was ten or so. Then all hell broke loose. On top of my head. Massive frizz the color of straw.

Braids became my savior. Any solution to tame that unruly crop that suddenly appeared up there. I remember my grandma and mother making my plats so tight my head would ache. But the mess was hidden and undercover. I used to hate it. Hate it…Hate it!

Why is it we are cursed to covet what we don’t have? I have done everything throughout my life since those braids to get rid of the curls. Not the hair, just those darn curls. For me, it is and always has been ‘straight-hair-envy’.

When my mother was getting poodle perms I was embarrassed by my curly, unruly hair. I thought she was crazy to ruin her nice straight hair to look like our family pet. But she didn’t think twice about keeping mine in braids like a show horse’s tail.

At thirteen ‘The Hair War’ between mother and daughter about cutting my hair finally was won by me, and she chopped off my braids. But that’s when the next battle began. The one between me and my new short and wild hair finally escaping from its braided jail.

I struggled through high school using pony tails to normalize the life sprouting from my scalp, but it wasn’t until the mid 60’s that I found out about a cure to what ails me. Hair straightening! I had discovered my new best friend! Considering every model and movie star had beehives and straight hair, my tangled mess was anything but beautiful in the eyes of the celebrity world back then. So I was relaxing, straightening and rolling. This girl did everything measurable within the law to kill my curls.

At home and away from the public eye I walked around like a space alien in front of my children with empty frozen orange juice cans bobby pinned on my head trying, oh so trying, to look like Farrah Fawcett. This was the best method available to me at the time to murder the kink on my head.

And then something quite strange came trending out in the 80’s. Curly hair ?! It was…. It was….. everywhere! Natural, permed, short, or voluminous. Curly was in vogue. Meg Ryan, Susan Sarandon! Gosh, I hadn’t gone out in public with my curly hair in almost 20 years! What in the world?? Should I dare to just shower, fluff it dry and go out of the house?

Nuts as it sounds, that first time I walked out of our apartment onto the streets of Manhattan with my curly hair, I was a little weirded out about being so nakedly honest as to who I really was. To step out being the real me and to embrace, to accept the whole me which included that mass upon my head was hard and a long ride down in the elevator to the street.

I will forever blame it on my husband. It took the ‘hair love’ of my husband for the first time in my entire life to really, really accept my unruly wild and naturally curly hair. He made me do it. It was my husband, finally, who told me to just ‘go for it.’

So recently, when I posted a new profile picture on my Facebook page my cousin made a nice comment about my hair. That reminded me about a photo album my husband has compiled throughout the years taking literally thousands of pictures of my hair. He has always bizarrely been obsessed with my wild hair. So one thing leading to another, and with writing time on my hands today, forgive me for digressing from more important things and selfishly opening up to you about my hair woes and joys.

As a dear friend of mine who suffers from alopecia often reminds me, more is more, less is less and no fun at all.

She is right. There has been a truce. I have made peace with my hair. At last.

P. S. I still haven’t thrown away my magic wand to straightness-my long and narrow hot iron. I suppose if I were a smoker it would be like vaping or sneaking around the corner for a puff or too. Sadly, still addicted. Sometimes. But still at peace.

Copyright Sandra Hart 2014. All rights reserved.

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Hits and Misses

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The other day I went to see Woody Allen and John Turturro in “Fading Gigolo”. I have worked for both of these actor/directors, so in spite of the fact that Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 55% Green Tomatoes, I gave it a chance. And you know what? I liked it. I very rarely have allowed myself or my tastes to be dictated by the critics. If I like the actors, I always have been curious to see for myself. Fading Gigolo.

Well I have a story to tell about that if you are willing to read on. Proof that, sometimes, unfortunately, the critics are right.

Fall of 1996…………..

ILLUMINATA

I did a small scene while sitting in a fake loge in The Paramount Theater, a grand old abandoned movie theater in Newark, New Jersey that was built in 1895. Illuminata was a period piece so I was dressed in a long black corseted ball gown appropriate for theater going in the era. The problem was, since the loge was only for decoration there were no steps leading to it. I had to climb a high ladder to get to the space with the crew holding it steady and my underwear in full view. In any other circumstance I would have been mortified, but work is work, and the reality is, well, reality. And,of course, since it was a fake loge, there were no seats for my fellow actor and I. It was just a dark, dirty area that had never been used- ever- for anything except for architectural appeal. Naturally, on a movie set there is an answer for everything. The problem was solved quickly by wooden orange crates being hauled up and placed just far enough apart to look like seats and to keep the scene realistic.

Take one. Take two. Take three. In the space of an hour we were carefully descending the ladder to the safely of the theater floor. It was at that point after the adrenaline of working subsided that I felt a severe itching and burning on my back. Naturally would it be anything else but in a spot beyond my reach. I gave up trying to feel it with my hand and decided as uncomfortable as it was, it probably was a stave in the corset pinching my back. So with a ‘show must go on’ attitude, I took my place in the regular balcony seats as instructed by John, so that he could get a close up of my clapping hands to be used for a stage scene audience reaction with Susan Sarandon who was playing an actress.

Finishing and still in pain, I headed into the wardrobe area to be undressed by the wardrobe assistants. Underneath everything I removed, they discovered an inflamed area that looked like a spider bite. It was. The nurse on set gave me some antihistamine and ointment.

It took about three weeks for the bite to heal, but much longer for the movie to be released. Usually, movies come out a year after they have rapped. Not Illuminata. It was at least about two years before I saw a tiny ad in the movie section of the newspaper with Susan Sarandon’s name so small it was almost invisible. That alone should have hit me over the head as an omen of what was to come.

I excitedly, finally, was going to see the movie, see me, and enjoy the fruits of my hard work and spider bite. Well, the movie was so bad, for the first time in my life, I didn’t stay to see if my scenes were in the movie or not. It was such a disappointment. It was awful. To this day, I still haven’t revisited the film.

So, I guess the moral of or lesson in this experience, is that in life, none of us is immune to hits and misses. Even creative geniuses like John Tuturro.

(Actual review: Turturro tricks you into thinking there’s magic realism streaming through this ode to art and commited love – despite there being little magic and not a trace of reality to speak of.)

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