I've gone back to a decade I never lived through. I've gone back to the 1930s. No, not economically, thank goodness. It's a matter of style�hairstyles�and it's not a matter of my style. Blame it on the theater. Blame it on the local high school production of "Wonderful Town."

The edict from the director came home. She wanted 1930s hairstyles. Finger waves for Day were out. Day has long and very, very, very straight hair. She takes after my mother that way. My mother has been known to comment that you can put her wedding pictures in order by watching the curl fall out of her hair. My mother is not far from wrong. I'm not absolutely sure of the order of one or two of them that probably were taken fairly closely together but I can put some of them in order. So, I was not very hopeful.

I began researching. Google was my friend. It strikes me as entirely possible that someday the government might ask why I had such a preoccupation with hairstyles of the 1930s but I'm not very worried. I'm much more worried that some of the searches I end up doing for work on treatment of sex offenders will cause problems. I've never heard of a terroristic hair dresser---at least not yet. Besides, if I couldn't get Day's hair to hold a curl, I could hardly hide anything in there, not even a bobby pin.

And then I came up with it. The solution to the problem looked like rag curls and heavy duty liquid gel. Day could sleep in rag curls and they might just stay in for a few hours. So, we tried it on Saturday night and it worked. It took an hour to put them all in but she found she could sleep on them. Sunday, just before the first tech/dress rehearsal, we spent twenty minutes taking them out. There they were: tight spiral curls everywhere. The director was thrilled. K², the student teacher in the theater program this past fall, had been hired to help with hair and she was thrilled. Luckily, she has very curly hair herself and therefore knew exactly how to work with it.

Amazingly, these curls were so tight that, although they were still loosening this morning, they were still there. Day is complaining that between the gel and the hairspray they could practically walk away on their own but if they will last long enough that we only have to do them every other day during the show, I will be a happy woman (and FogieKnight will be glad to hear that so little will make me happy as that little has never worked before.) I'll know sometime this evening after Day is home from rehearsal. (She won't be home until 8:00, which means staying up late with her homework. There's a reason the kids call this week "hell week.")

The girl's hair is staying curled. I'm a success. Hip, Hip, Hooray! Or, as they sang in the 1930s, "Happy Days are Here Again."

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