Don't let your soul glow

A great colleague who recently moved here from the deeper South recently expressed some mild outrage to me the other week that since she moved to Virginia, she's been seeing an awful lot of Jheri Curls.

I guess it's one of those fashion crimes, like un-ironic mullets, Christmas sweaters (worn with a turtleneck, always) and men who wear stiff jeans with that thick crease down the middle that I've just begun to tune out since moving here myself nearly three years ago. I guess I just see so many wretched style choices around these parts I've put up a block.

But then I started  actively looking for curls and dog if I didn't see at least three in the past few weeks. Jesus take the wheel...and the activator!

(A Jheri Curl is, for the uninitiated, a black hairstyle popular in the 80s that required some strange cooking of the hair in a salon, and then the continuous application of copious amounts of liquid greasy goo to make the hair look like shiny cooked Ramen noodles cascading from the scalp.)

I will keep it real: I kinda always wanted a Jheri Curl. As a child at Michael Jackson's height, I had everything I needed to be Michael. I had the jacket, the gloves, the socks, the penny loafers, a few buttons, posters and so on. Yet there was one final piece necessary to make my Jacksonian tribute complete. I begged and pleaded with my mom for a Jheri Curl, and she was having none of it. (I thank her tenfold for this now, since I, unlike so many people I grew up with, have no incriminating Jheri Curl photos to haunt me.) Weeks went by; she would not budge. So I decided to give myself a curl. 

Right before school one morning, I figured that if I could just activate my hair's natural curl, we'd be in business. Surely there had to be something lying around the house to shock my hair into cooperation! As mom was getting ready I found my muse: a massive tub of petroleum jelly. I dug my hand into the jar and scooped out an entire handful, smearing it all over my head. I repeated and repeated until my head was almost leaning to the side, heavy with Vaseline. (Can you imagine getting ready for work and your kid's school and discover a shiny halo of Vaseline over his head?) In an impressive display, my mom managed to spank me and wash my hair at the same time.

Weeks later, Michael's hair caught on fire in a Pepsi commercial. I remember seeing it on the news, and, Michael being my personal deity, I was nearly in tears. Will he die mom? Will he be ok? She didn't say a word. She just shot me this glance that said, 'See? That's what happens when you wear Jheri Curls. Your head catches on fire.' Needless to say, me and the curl were done.  

Even then, Curls were the butt of jokes. Kids would be like, 'Shut up and go get some Jheri juice!'  Jheri's kids always had to carry around little bottles of activator, which they had to keep spritzing like a tacky bachelor with Binaca trying to score. Or, God forbid you'd come in from recess, and the sun had cruelly soaked up all your moistness -- kids would be like, 'Dude, your curl is dry!' and it would be this merciless, vicious teasing. But the worse was the bus ride. A Jheri juice'd head anywhere in the proximity of those emerald "fleather" bus seats was bound to leave an orbit-sized stain, and please believe the second you got up you'd be teased in absentia. Curl ridicule was practically an entire sub-plot of 'Coming to America.' I shudder to think how adults coped during this disgraceful period when dates spent the night; profits from pillowcases, sheets and couch plastic must have factored heavily into the "me-me/Reaganomics" fortunes of the 80s.

And so, who is bringing this back? I'll admit for a second, I thought recently about bringing it back for some sort of retro-ironic tribute, but this has to be done exceedingly carefully. And besides, no. Plus the people I'm seeing doing this are not doing it with any irony -- I know because their gator shoes and matching zoot suit combos tell me they think it's fly.

Folks please, let's leave this one where it belongs: in the annals of unfortunate nostalgia. If you want to be old-school, upgrade to a high top fade at the very least. Jeesh.

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