Hell Hath No Fury Like a Bad Hair Day | by Susan Robbie | Oct, 2025

I have always had poker straight hair. No sign of a curl. Nope, not even with the worst bedhead days. My mother’s solution to giving my hair some body was to perm it. Twice a year, from the ages of 6–10 years old, I had a thick, curly perm.

My friends all had long straight hair, some wore ponytails but not me. Just this big bouffant of abundant curls. I hated it. I remember that my second-grade teacher made an unkind comment about my hair, and I went home and cried. She said I was too young for hair like that and to tell my mother to change it. Wow, that’s a real blow to self esteem.

Then Jane Fonda starred in the movie Klute and the shag haircut was born. I wanted it and I got it. It was heavily layered short hair and everyone wanted it. It was modern and sassy. I wore it a few years and then it went out of style. Try growing that out. It took forever. Never again.

My timing of the shag was dismal. I had it cut for my high school graduation picture. My mother’s friend recommended a “master” hairstylist so my mother made an appointment for myself, my sister and her. When we arrived, it turned out that the haircuts were $10 each. Okay, this is in the 1970s on a one-person, middle-class income. Today, it would be about $60 ($180 for 3 people). My mother panicked. This was long before credit cards and she didn’t have that kind of cash nor could she afford it. She opted just for me to have my hair cut. They were not happy and I was dying of embarrassment.

This great stylist cut my hair like he thought he belonged in Beverly Hills. Snip, snip, cut, cut. Done, complete, here I go. I am the new Jane Fonda…NOT. I didn’t realize until I was home that he cut my bangs in a way that when they fell naturally forward, they landed in a V shape. Yes, a V shape like Eddie Munster as the werewolf in the TV series The Munsters. I kid you not.

On the day of my graduation picture, I gently combed my bangs to the side, perfect, ready to go and for some reason, they fell into their natural V and Eddie Munster is now in my high school yearbook. It’s a good thing I never became famous because it would haunt me for the rest of my life. As it is, my sister brought it to my workplace baby shower and everyone had a big laugh.

Have you ever had a really awful, uneven haircut? We’ve all had those, right? I’ve had it where my bangs are cut so short that I look like Peter Pan. The worst part is when people say “I see you cut your hair. Do you like it?” Obviously, if someone is asking that then what they are really saying is that your hair looks like you flushed it down the toilet and then combed it with a hacksaw.

Most of my career was in the insurance field but for 9 months I decided to go to beauty school. Back then I used a henna to give my brown hair a reddish tinge. The instructor decided she would use me to demonstrate to the class how to apply a henna. Traditionally, you just wet the hair, leave it on for about 1 hour and then rinse. Nope. This brilliant woman chose to put me under the dryer.

Upon rinsing, I was Lucille Ball. My hair was full on red and I trust me when I tell you, I don’t look good as a redhead. Horrified and frustrated, I washed and washed and washed and it took months for my color to come back. After I graduated beauty school, I went back into insurance. Definitely not for me.

I adopted my son and daughter from Russia. Once a year, for one week, this city shuts off the hot water. You know where this is going. They shut the hot water off the week I went there. When I talk about cold water, I mean submerge yourself in the Arctic Ocean and maybe, just maybe, that’s how cold the water was. I improvised. I had my sister put water on my head using the bathroom sink spigot but she put way too much shampoo so it took forever to rinse it out. Essentially, I had an open craniotomy without anesthesia. Every hair on my head was standing up in shock or maybe just frozen that way.

Court is the next day. I plug in the blow dryer to attempt to undo some of this damage and the dryer blows up. I used a special converter so this wouldn’t happen but it did. So now my hair looks like I was standing on my head all night and I have nothing to fix it.

Maybe the judge was used to prospective parents looking stunned rather than stunning because she agreed to the adoption and I am now mother to two wonderful children.

We’ve all had these bad hair days. We’ve probably all felt like shaving our heads at one time and wearing a wig. After the humiliation wears off (which could take years), laugh about it. Because no matter how bad your hair looks, you can’t beat Eddy Munster for a yearbook photo.