Shirley and Me

~~Shirley Temple & Me~~ 

Females have always followed the vagaries of fashion regardless of how old they may be, don’t you agree?  When I was about 3rd grade age, my mother took me to the “beauty school” downtown for a permanent.  It cost $1.25, and took an interminably long time because the student working on your head had to stop at each stage and have her supervisor check the work in progress.
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There was none of today’s soft pampering with soft curlers, a dab of watermelon scent perm lotion, maybe 10 minutes of “cooking” and then a nice neutralizing rinse. In the 1930s, after the operator rolled your hair and clamped on huge insulated covers over each curl, you were hooked up to the processor–black wires emanating from your head extending way on up to a mysterious source near the ceiling.
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You were ultimately a sitting duck if there were a fire in the building and since you couldn’t get away you were really “wired”.
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The most exquisite pleasure came the next day at school, when George Berman, the love of my 3rd grade life, pulled one of the sausage curls falling daintily on my forehead….it bounced back perfectly. This was as close a compliment as a rotten little boy was capable of expressing. And why do I still remember his name? That’s kind of weird, isn’t it?
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But on this day, everything was perfect. I left the “beauty school” with my Shirley Temple knock-off hairdo. It was amazingly impressive. If I’d had taps on my shoes I could have danced all the way home. I was one happy kid.
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Anyway, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Thank you, Shirley Temple, you truly made this one little girl very happy.