Part of reinventing yourself involves appearance. Every now and then we need a change; we need to shake it up; we need a reaction. And there’s nothing better for creating reaction than hair.

My new, and quite beautiful, Fodor’s guide to Oregon (written by Judy Jewell) states that “there are probably more dreadlocked white people here than anywhere else in North America.” (90)

I have always been interested in dreadlocks. When it’s long my hair’s curl lends itself to ringlets, so it seemed a natural progression. Of course, now I live in the desert and the ringlets are harder to come by. But when I go to Eugene, Oregon, to get my PhD, I will be in the land of humidity once more and therefore the land of ringlets. Could a girl transition from ringlets to dreads?

Well, I’m not a girl anymore. Would that make it even more interesting? Get a bigger reaction? Maybe not, since no one knows me in Eugene anyway and also Eugene is renown for its culture of exiled hippies from days past. Maybe I would fit in and be considered mainstream. The whole idea behind reinvention is to feel like a new person.

There is a singer on this season’s American Idol, Crystal Bowersox, who is in the finale this week. Crystal comes from a background of street singing and she has a head of dreads. For the first couple of weeks there were always one or two pesky dreads that stuck out from her head like she had insect legs poking through her hair, but soon the show’s hair police got control of them.

 

Crystal is white, obviously, which means she would’ve had to go through the white folks process to get her dreads. The dread in dreadlocks is associated with fear of God in the Rastafarian religion. But for white people there could be significant dread of the process, which entails: Stopping all conditioner for a few weeks to dry the hair out (use bar soap as shampoo, which leaves a gummy residue on the hair); each strand to be dreaded is back combed, or what we used to call “teasing”; gum up each strand with dread wax and twist and roll. Be careful of water for a few weeks. Use anything to keep the hair gummy and dried out, making sure what you use doesn’t attract live creatures, i.e., honey, molasses, old chewing gum.

Wow, is it worth it?  For white people this process goes against everything we’ve learned to do to keep our hair healthy. And do I plan to spend the rest of my natural life with my dreads? Or even two weeks?  The alternative is to cut them all off down to the nub like harvesting individual bananas.

I think I liked her better with the dreads.

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