I believe some ladies have thrown down the dork gauntlet, and I intend to respond with my crappy pictures of pictures. I present to you: the evolution of hair, 1980-1993.

It started out friendly enough. Kindergarten. Other than the vast expanse of my fivehead, mom was doing okay.

At some point the fivehead becomes apparent to my mom, and I get mom-bangs. You know, where mom is like “it’s such a waste of money for us to pay someone to cut her bangs in a straight line, I can totally do this.” Perhaps my ever-in-motion eyebrows were the problem:

You know, you can dress bangs up, or dress bangs down. You can even make them misty in an Olan Mills portrait. But getting them straight is harder than it looks. Here we have the side-swipe technique for the matching mom-bangs.

The only logical answer to the roving eyebrows, of course, is some kind of object that doesn’t move around when she’s trying to cut my bangs. Some kind of… immoveable landmark. Something to measure the bangs against. I have just the thing!

You can’t outdork me, sistah. This isn’t even the “wings” picture.

Booyah. Making this even better? See the straps of my teensy training bra through my shirt. Yeah. Only kid in the fifth grade with a bra. And note that the owlish glasses in the wings picture are not even the same glasses as the ones I’m wearing in the one above it. Equally large, but one had the earpieces up, and the other down. I broke my glasses roughly every fifteen seconds in an attempt to have some glasses that did not suck.

What’s a girl to do? Obviously, it was time to take my hair destiny into my own tiniest-curling-iron-ever hands. I spent a year  curling my hair for two hours every morning. Seriously? That curling iron was as big around as my pinky. And I curled. every. single. inch. of. my. hair.

Finally, after a year of showing my devotion to to this particular hairstyle, my mom relented and let me get a perm. The results were, I think, extraordinary:

Do you know how many times I had to do through the Aquanet/scorch with a curling iron/pick it out/scorch it again/spray the crap out of it cycle to get it this tall?!? And if you picked it out too much, it got all flakey and dandruff-looking and you had to wet them, wash them, blow them out upside down, and start all over again. Oh, the teenage angst.

By sophomore year, I was letting the perm get a little more relaxed, but the allover effect was much larger. Resembling Mufasa himself. Just to give you some scope. I am wearing three shirts in this picture (oxford, cheerleading sweater, and another sweater) and my hair is still bigger.

Man, I want to listen to Poison just looking at this picture. By senior year, while the size had not been diminished, the look was softer and rounder. Kind of like me. Because this was the year I stopped dancing six days a week.

Thus ends my hair’s illustrious career in compulsory education. In college? Oh gawd. It was the grunge years. And I think there are probably ten pictures of me during that entire expanse. (At least that’s what I’m telling you.)