Academic

Traveling the past two weeks, I haven't passed a TV monitor in an airport that wasn't showing the "Sesame Street video gone viral":  "I Love My Hair."  It's a great song meant to assure the writer's daughter, Segi, from Ethiopia, that her locks are perfect just the way they are.  It's wonderful.

However, not to be left beind, Dominique Browning in the NYT on Sunday has her own "I Love My Hair" article.  She does not mention our Sesame Street heroine, but the timing seems a little coincidental.  She doesn't say she loves her hair; she says, "I feel great about my hair."  Not as catchy.  So why does Browning need to own her (presumably naturally straight and tractable) hair?  Because she is a "woman of a certain age" and she has long hair.  And parts of it are grey.  Yet, she embraces it.

If you haven't seen me lately, my hair is really long.  I'm not sure why.  Inertia, busyness, lazyness.  I think part of me realizes that because of my advanced age, that when I cut it this time, this will be it.  Where I come from (a country called West Texas), women over 18 aren't supposed to have long hair, much less women over 40.  It's unseemly.  But yet, outside the watchful eyes of my 93 year-old grandma, who has had short hair for as long as I can remember and aslong as cameras have been invented, I have grown out my hair. 

I would make a YouTube video about my straight, long blondish hair, but that would be unseemly against the message of "I Love My Hair."  (My hair isn't even gray, but as Browning notes "an impressive testament to our unending chemical creativity".")  But maybe, the Sesame Street video spoke to all of us, from little girls with curly hair to Dominique Browning.  We Love Our Hair:  curly, gray, long or old.