Rural Weaves

So, full disclosure: I didn't write this. The Husband did. He wrote it after Isabella's dance recital last spring. I ran across it this afternoon, and it made me laugh. So, I'm going to share it with you and hope it makes you laugh, too. He didn't make any of it up, by the way. 


Dictionary.com defines a weave as a process in which a hairpiece is interwoven with real hair to conceal alopecia or increase the thickness or length of the hairstyle. Why am I sitting here thinking about weaves? We’ll get to that.

As many of you are aware, I went to an "urban" high school. Thusly, I am familiar with the concept of a weave. Generally, it was part of an insult hurled from one girl to another.

For instance, “Don’t shake your head at me! Your sorry weave’ll fall out!” Or, “Don’t come with that fake attitude that goes with your fake hair!”

These, of course, are approximations as said insults usually came with very demonstrative body language and peppered with some, um, colorful word choices. This rendered them more specific and a whole lot funnier.

So why am I sitting in rural America pondering weaves? Because I just witnessed more flying fake hair than when a classmate of mine didn’t keep both of his girlfriends far enough apart. It made me nervous then, maybe because one of the girlfriends turned on Ronny armed with a stapler and an extremely bad attitude. Unfortunately my advanced age hasn’t provided me any sort of understanding regarding the concept.

Saturday evening, I dutifully attended my daughter’s dance recital.  No, that’s not exactly right. That makes it sound easy. Saturday I cleared everyone out of my wife’s way for hours as she helped Isabella with her hair, makeup and costume. This included providing encouragement, running errands, complementing her progress and most importantly, flawlessly reading her mind to anticipate each of these needs.

Then, I met my in-laws, kept my two younger children quiet and well-behaved during all 36 dance numbers and purchased a rose for Isabella after the event.

The dancing wasn’t entirely painful. Some of the groups were really quite good, and many of the music selections were enjoyable. With the exception of one adult male, who apparently had daughters in almost every number, only teenagers screamed out names during the dances.

There was also a significant decrease compared to last year in the obnoxious posturing and videotaping. For some reason, there seemed to be a drastic uptick in the use of weaves.

I do understand that here in rural America there might not be the level of experience on the subject that was available to the girls in my neck of the woods, so I would like to offer a bit of advice on the matter. Consider it to be my little urban contribution to my new home.

First of all, it really works best if you try to match the color of the weave to the color of your daughter’s actual hair. Sometimes the girls I knew would weave in different colors, but to pull this off you have to go all in. In 1989, it was fashionable to braid in your school colors or match your neon leg warmers. But, putting a platinum blonde weave on a sort-of blonde child just makes it look as if you got tired of shopping.

Second, you should carefully select the style. Unfortunately, stick-your-finger-in-a-light-socket curly appears to rank very high on the popularity scale here. There are other options. Ones that don’t look like Wil E. Coyote after he accidentally detonated a trap for the Roadrunner. You might consider a bit more variety.  A bunch of little girls with fake hair is mildly disturbing, but a bunch of little girls with identical fake hair is a bit too Stepford Wives for many of us.

Lastly, we really need to discuss the importance of the weave actually staying on the head. I witnessed some fights in high school where even a well-applied, vicious yank wasn’t enough to budge a weave. Admittedly, I’m not sure of the methods they used to secure their hair, but I would think that with a bit of ingenuity and some pins you could come up with something that would make it through more than one tumbling pass.

By the end of a number, one mat looked as if it were full of sad, lost woodland creatures with little balls of curls dotting the area. And, back to the hair matching point, I’m not sure how the girls sorted out which little tuft was whose.

I hope these tips were useful. I’m still not convinced that weaves are a necessary part of the dance recital experience. My daughter looked just beautiful and all my wife needed was a one-inch curling iron and some Aussie freeze spray. Of course, I’ve seen pictures of her in high school and she definitely came to the table with some big hair experience on her resume.

All things considered, the day could have been much worse. My daughter did great and was very proud of her performance, my wife made it through with only limited amounts of sedatives, and I ended up being entertained.

Aside from the joy it brought my daughter, the cost of the monthly lessons, the costume (which, by the way, cost more than a whole month of lessons), and all of the little extras such as the make up and curling iron were all worth it to see a $40 weave fall off of a four-year old and her horrified mother look on as the girl tossed it up in the air repeatedly instead of participating in the dance. Priceless. And a sure-fire guarantee that I’m going to buy a video.

By the way, my new favorite hairspray is Aussie because of their instructions for use on the bottle. “It’s hairspray. You put it on your hair.”