Old Hairspray, New Job

It’s the morning of my job interview and I am totally prepared. I’ve been out of the workforce for a while, so I am a little jittery, but I have a good feeling about this one. My outfit hangs pressed and ready. I am up early and I am almost ready to go. I have plenty of time. My makeup is good and my hair is up in the cutest retro bouffant. Then there is that critical moment where I look in the mirror and I think, do I need hairspray? I mean it looks great now, but what if there is a freak wind? What if that tiny pin curl I redid three times decides to unpins right in front of my face, just as I introduce myself? So I dig deep in the back of my closet for just that extra little bit of security.

Big mistake! This was not big sexy hair as advertised! This was halloween cobwebs in a can. It literally turned my hair grey. Suddenly, my hair was one dry gluey mass, and it was cemented to my head. I swear, it crackled when I moved. I tried to keep things in perspective, though. I once burned my bangs right off with a curling iron, and I went right from that interview to a hair salon for an emergency appointment. Needless to say, I didn’t get that particular job. So I thought maybe I was just nervous and being overly critical. I decided to go downstairs and ask my mom’s opinion.

That’s when you know it’s bad, when your own mother says it looks like a pile of sticks. With lightning speed, we went at it together, throwing hairpins in every direction. Because life is cruel, it’s at that exact moment that the phone rings. They have arrived and they are ready and waiting. Disaster, my hair is half up and half down. There is lipstick on the floor of the bathroom, where someone has stepped in it and my hair is huge. I mean it is totally massive. It practically fills the doorway as I run to the phone and cooly answer, “Great, I’ll be right there!” Thank you high school drama class.

I ripped a brush through my hair. I think there were sparks, but I am lucky there weren’t, or I would have gone up like a Christmas candle. Yes, I get my beauty advice from youtube and I can pull off a sock-bun in less than a minute. I grabbed some hairpins off the floor, stuck them in, and we were out the door. “That was totally weird,” I said to my mother, “but hopefully that is the worst of it, and it will only get better from here.” It certainly did, and I got the job too.