The Hair Battle
My hair complicates my life in a surprising number of ways. It's naturally somewhere between curly and straight, and I spent many years fighting with it and trying to make it one or the other (like in this photo, during the phase when I was pretending it was curly, or the one below when I was in a straightening phase). In grad school, I usually don't have the time/will/energy/sense to care what my hair is doing most days.
Part of the hair battle that's been toughest for me is where the Actor part of me kicks in. Must not do anything drastic. Must look like head-shot. Must appear cast-able.
I always WANT to experiment with my hair, but being an actor makes me afraid to touch it. At one point I wrote "Willing to drastically alter hair" on my résumé, with the hope that a show might give me the excuse I'd been looking for to do something crazy with it. But aside from one director who let me have "raven hair" when I played Diana Barry in Anne of Green Gables, most productions beg me to NOT change my hair. So it stayed long and brown for a very, very long time.
Right after I got into graduate school, I realized that I didn't really have to look like my head-shot, as I wasn't going to be auditioning for anything in a conventional way for awhile. And that's when my hair became black with red streaks.
When I got here, I asked if I could chop it off. Think Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. Surprisingly, I got the go-ahead from all the people at the theatre who currently have more ownership rights to my appearance than I do (which is a lot of people, actually). But I chickened out. Eventually, I went shoulder-length, just for the sake of convenience.
Right now, my hair is back to my usual brown. When it's straight, it's past my collarbone, and when it's curly it brushes my shoulders. But between The Mystery Plays and Machinal, I'm going to have a couple of months when I'm not in any show... And I thought it would be the perfect time to give a crazy color a try.
I asked the hair designer of my theatre what she thought, and she looked like she was on the verge of a heart attack as soon as soon as the word "blue" came out of my mouth. I tried to comfort her with phrases like "semi-permanent" and "no bleach". I made sure to use the sentence, "And I'd dye it back to brown before the next show..." She didn't seem all that comforted.
So I guess I'm staying at brown for the moment. Unless they decide that Machinal is going to take place in some dance club/punk rock clique/future world where blue hair would fit in perfectly. (A girl can dream.)
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