Sissy celebrated her new highschool junior ID badge by deconstructing her facial features and pointing out all the flaws of each. This is a fun pastime. You should try it right before you take the phone call from your future self and the stern talking-to that comes with it telling you that you are one-of-a-kind and beautiful in your uniqueness.
When she got to the part where her forehead was too high, I could sympathize. Not that her forehead is really too high, but mine definitely is.
Enough about Sissy; back to me. Do you know how I addressed my too-high forehead back in highschool? In the 80’s??
With a little invention called the whispie bang.
And because I lived in New Jersey (which everyone knows is the starting point of all amazing hair) I had to completely bastardize the bangs from their original feather lite kiss of hair into a shellacked tube of brown perched on my forehead. I mean, it was basically like having the cardboard center from the toilet paper roll taped to my forehead day in and day out. Same size, same shape and it didn’t even move during soccer practice. That’s how you know Aqua Net won the hairspray wars and contributed to the collapse of the ozone layer.
Are you now picturing a dozen girls running around a soccer field with cardboard toilet paper tubes taped to their foreheads? Because you should be. That’s exactly what soccer practice was like in highschool in the 80’s. Side note: we only had those yellow phones on the walls with the looooong, curly cords so it was extremely hard for our future selves to call and say, “No. Just…no.”
However, this low-riding hair tube clearly had the dual positive side effect of a) masking where my forehead actually started and ended or that I even had a forehead, while b) making the rest of my hair look very tall, which may have also been because the rest of my hair WAS very tall. And curly. Very, very curly. But not my bangs. They were straight because I blow-dried them that way around my ginormous round hair brush and then topped that treatment off by using my curling iron on them. Tube-alicious. And if you ran at just the right angle, you could make the wind whistle through them on the soccer field.
I explained the whispie bang scenario to Sissy in a brainstorm-y way (no bad ideas) for how she could address her own forehead if she felt it was too high. To which she replied, “I just feel like if no one ever did whispies again, we’d all be safe.”
Hmmm. Good point. But where’s the fun in that?
PS – My Darling Daughter, this is going to be one heck of a year! You are beautiful inside and out. You are incredibly smart, know all about math and are an amazing athlete with legs for miles. State tennis champ and varsity softball player, all your bits and pieces work together to create an amazingly lovely whole. And when it comes to your face, you are “on fleek” with your plush lips and your Megan Markle freckles. And when you well, and me, it was my idea, no bad ideas in brainstorming remember single-handedly bring back the whispie bang?!? TRIFECTA!!!