We started watching the
second season of Stranger Things and
it reminded me of the long-lasting evil of Dorothy Hamill’s haircut.
One of the kids in the show
has that bob/shag/bowl cut/whatever hairstyle that Hamill had in the 1976
Olympics (I hope for the actor’s sake that it’s some kind of wig). This reminds
me that anybody around my age had that hairstyle as a child. Go through any
photos of kids in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s and it’s there: that upside-down
bowl with the edges turned slightly inward.
That haircut was everywhere. It must have been compulsory
to parents, like a draft for follicles: You found out you were 1A and either
sent your child to the barber or fled to Canada as fast as your heel spurs
would permit you. It seemed like the Hamill hair lasted so much longer than it
should have. She had probably moved onto French braids while a nation of
toddlers was still cosplaying as her.
I bet that hair looked good
to parents back then, snowed in with a pot of fondue during a few weeks in
February 1976, watching Hamill on their Zenith color TV sets as she dazzled the
world in Innsbruck with her “Hamill camel” move, thinking idly of their
toddlers’ need for a haircut while trying to hide their disgust for President
Ford’s pardon of Nixon and nursing a grasshopper cocktail in a Quaalude haze. But
after the madness faded as the last of the Bicentennial fireworks fizzled out
and the tall ships sailed over the horizon, who realized what they had done to
their children?
Now we have to live not
only with the photos of ourselves with those structurally dubious haircuts but
they also creep up in every fictional period piece as a time signifier. Damn
you, Dorothy Hamill. Damn you and your haircut to hell.
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