My Hair

My Hair

- Meg Ryan

It’s funny having famous hair. It’s funny to have famous anything, for that matter. Fame has a half-life. It’s sort of like radioactivity—long after the original offense, you still feel the effects. The Internet has complicated the situation, but I’ve found that I can avoid news of myself by employing almost exactly the same skill set I use for not looking in mirrors. It’s a type of precision-controlled aversion well worth mastering, even if a bad-hair day does slip in, which is bound to happen. But so what? It’s nice being oblivious to the general skinny on yourself. Why bother with it? A general skinny has a life of its own, which is pretty much immune to management anyway.

I’m not exactly expert at ignoring myself, though, because news about me occasionally does waft in. For instance, I am aware that I once had a famous haircut. I know this mostly because I still see it on people in New York. Occasionally, it suits the person sporting it but mainly not, because it was the ’90s after all, and its time has passed. I also know this because Sally Hershberger, the stylist who put it on my head to begin with, told me so. Apparently, there were years and years when people would come to her with crumpled magazine pages and expect to leave her salon with the same cut as mine. She obliged as much as she could, but in some impossible cases—namely, for super-straight or very curly hair—she would have to deny the request. You can’t please everybody.