Oh, Joy! Lucky Us! Sample Essay

The following 2,500 word essay, written in tandem by PLS Development Officer Susan Grossman, her daughter Athena, and her mother, Alice Mathewson, is presented as an example of a work that meets the criteria of the Oh, Joy! Lucky Us! essay-writing Contest.  It serves as an option for structure only and should not be considered a template for subject, content, style, or theme. Employees of the Pioneer Library System and their immediate family members are not eligible to enter the competition.
 
Hair Bawls
by Susan Grossman
 
Every mother’s photo album contains a first-day-of-kindergarten photograph. Here is the picture my mother has of me: I am standing in front of a lilac bush, my coppery red, shoulder length hair is done in braids. The ends are tied with red ribbons to match the red flowers on my black dress. A white sweater is buttoned over my shoulders, like a set of football pads. On a large piece of white paper is my name and address, pinned to my white collar. With my head tilted to the left, I am squinting against the bright autumn Michigan sun.
 
Soon after my mother snapped this photograph, she had my hair cut off. My thick, shiny, red hair, chopped into a pixie. Why she did that, I ‘m not sure. I had a habit of chewing on the ends of it and twirling it around my fingers. This must have really bothered her. It didn’t bother me except when a particularly wet strand would stick to my cheek.
 
Probably unable to bear seeing hair in my mouth any longer, off we went to her hairdresser’s. My mother loved the Twiggy-style cut. Not me. I remember my head feeling light and airy. By force of habit, I kept trying to get a strand of hair in my mouth. There was none there to grab. I couldn’t even begin to stretch a bit from my ear down towards the corner of my mouth.
 
Eventually, she agreed to let my hair creep back to the length of my earlobes, still out of reach of the corner of my mouth. As it got longer, the red color got deeper. In grade school, I wished my hair were brown. Kids teased me, calling me red-headed rooster. Why was I born with red hair? These weren’t my real parents. They have brown hair. My older brother obviously didn’t belong to them either because he had hair the same color as mine.
 
My hair grew longer as I grew taller. By middle school, it drew attention but in a way that I actually liked. I became “that girl with the long red hair.” And, with the length of my hair came renewed hair battles with my mother. Although she won most of them, she finally conceded the war and threw in the brush. It wasn’t chewing on it this time that did her in. More likely, she reached her limit with my daily shouts of, “You’re hurting me!”as she not always gently yanked the brush through my now waist-long tresses.
 
So, I fixed my own hair, thank you, and my school pictures showed it. Clips stuck in at odd angles, one side falling down, the other staying up, a fat braid on one side and a skinny one on the other. Or, the long braids looped up and tied with ribbons near my ears. The best was not putting it up at all. But there was one rule my mother would not relinquish – it had to be out of my face for school.
 
We washed it together on weekends. Convinced all that hair would somehow ruin the bathroom plumbing, my mother washed it in the laundry room in our basement. With a towel spread on top of the washer and dryer, I lay down on top of that, my head on the edge of the washing machine and my hair spilling over into the wash basin where the washing machine emptied out during the spin cycle. In this position, my mother squirted a half bottle of shampoo onto my head, scrubbed my scalp and worked her way to the ends.
 
Then, with the aid of a bottle of No More Tangles, she laboriously combed it out. We had really nice talks during this ritual and hair washing became something we looked forward to doing.
 
When it was warm, I went outside to dry it in the sun. I was not allowed to use a blow dryer. Something about burning down the house by overheating the dryer during the extensive period required to dry the whole thing.
 
After all this time, I still have long hair. It has only been short three times in my life. The first thanks to my mom. The second was when I graduated from college and wanted to look grown up and professional. I looked about 15. The third time was about 10 years ago when I was the editor of a large newspaper. Not sure how I ended up with a short style that took so long to maneuver in the mornings but I grew that one out not long after I cut it.
 
Hair battles returned to my house when my daughter was little. Getting a haircut for her was a traumatic ordeal. The first time we went, I thought the stylist was going to stab her with the scissors, Athena was screaming so much. I gave up haircuts until she was about four.
 
“Ow! You’re hurting me!” she would yell as I tried to brush her thick, russet colored hair.
 
I would respond in that exasperated tone mothers have perfect so well.
 
“Athena, I don’t know why we just don’t cut this mess off!”
 
“No! No!” she would protest and put her hands lovingly over her hair to protect it.
 
Now at 19, Athena has not had short hair since she was in kindergarten and wore it in an adorable, chin-length bob. But I too, gave up trying to fix it when she hit middle school. It was just too irritating.
 
She is a dancer and for years we would argue about getting her updos and buns just right for rehearsals, recitals and performances. Sitting in front of the mirror, I would stand behind her surrounded by styling implements and attempt to follow her specific instructions, which I could never get quite right.
 
“It’s too bumpy on the top,” Athena would declare. Or, “The ponytail needs to be higher.”
 
Finally, I had had enough of the critiquing and complaining and handed over the brush to her.
 
 
 
By Alice Mathewson
 
When Susan was born she had no hair. But when she was one I realized her hair was going to be red and that I would have two redheaded children, as her brother, who was three years older, also had red hair.
 
As the years went by, people would stop and tell me how beautiful they were with their coppery-colored hair. It was not a common sight to see.
 
I do remember cutting Susan’s hair when she was a little girl because she chewed on it, and I just reached the point where I could not stand it. She wore an adorable hairstyle that I called a “cap cut” because it fell tightly around her ears and neck. Like all little girls Susan wanted to grow it out, and I let her do that when she was in elementary school, although I insisted that her hair be kept out of her face. She had, and still has, very thick hair.
 
In 1976 Farrah Fawcett was a huge star and had that big, wide-winged hair. All the girls wanted their hair like that, including Susan. So, in junior high school we went down to the beauty shop after school and asked for the Farrah Fawcett haircut. We did not have hair salons then, only barber shops and beauty parlors. I don’t think anyone realized at the time that Farrah had a team of professional stylists who made her hair look like that.
 
We rolled Susan’s hair up that night in empty, frozen orange juice cans because they were the perfect size to get soft curls. Not sure how she slept with those in. I was working early then, as a nurse, and had to be at work at 7 a.m. and Susan was really worried about who was going to help with her new hairstyle in the morning. While she had mastered fixing her hair in braids, pigtails and ponytails, “styling” was a whole new ballgame.
 
I already was at work when I got a phone call from her father the next morning. This was unusual as my husband never called me when I was working.  He was helping her get ready. Or, I should say, he was trying.
 
“Susan is crying and refusing to go to school,” my husband said. “What should I do?”
 
Apparently, the hair style looked little like the glamorous Farrah Fawcett.  I could hear Susan complaining in the background. By this point in her life, I had gotten tired of the teenage girl who would not go out of the house without looking perfect.  I was rather irritated, I must admit. Her father was perplexed and didn’t know what to do with a crying teenage girl.
 
“Get the spray bottle I use for ironing, spray her hair down to get it straight, put a bandana on it and send her to school!” I instructed him.
 
When I hung up the phone, the rest of the nursing staff told me I looked mad. I guess I was. If I had been home I don’t think this would have been an issue but with her dad, well, let’s say he was not quite equipped to deal with girls and their hair.
 
Susan was not happy with either of us. Me, because I made her go to school with a bandana on her head, and her dad probably because he had never really done much with hair. I am sure he did the best he could.
 
However, I felt it was ridiculous to stay home because your hair did not look right. I do know she made a modification to her hair because it had not been cut right, and we had to go somewhere else to get it fixed.  By the time she graduated from high school, her Farrah hair had been perfected because her senior photo is really beautiful with lovely feathered hair.
 
The funny thing about hair that I see ,is when I was a girl, we washed our hair once a week with White Rain shampoo and set it with rags. I had long, chestnut colored hair and wore it in braids or a pony tail. By the time I had my own daughter, there was a hair product explosion. Susan sometimes washed her hair twice a day, especially in the summer when it got sweaty. My granddaughter does the same thing, taking two showers a day sometimes to fix her hair. And the products! My goodness, between the curling irons, straighteners, hair dryers that promise quick drying, curlers, twisty curlers – I am amazed at the merchandising that goes in to promoting hair.
 
I also had long hair for quite some time, but when we moved to Oklahoma from Oregon, I cut my hair short because it was too darn hot to wear it long. I have spent quite a lot of time, and money, on my hair as well.
 
It must be a girl thing.

 
By Athena Grossman
 
The other day, I called my mom a ginger. She got kinda irritated with me and I was surprised. Until she explained to me that the word “ginger” for people with red hair is derogatory. This seems funny to me but apparently in some parts of the world, it’s not.
 
I always thought she liked being a redhead, and I guess most of the time she does. But teasing her about it is not such a good idea, even at her age. No one I know cares about their hair color. I mean, a lot of people dye their hair all kinds of colors and it is no big deal.
 
My own hair is really thick and brown but if I stand in the sunlight, it has reddish highlights. My older brother’s hair is the same color, except his turns blond in the summer because he is out in the sun a lot. His beard, however, remains red year round. Even though we don’t care much for his beard, he tells us he likes it because it is the same color as our mom’s hair.  We have really good hair genes.
 
A good friend of mine from dance has red hair and pale skin. When my mom was around us both, people thought she was her daughter, not me. We used to let people think that sometimes for a joke.
 
Since I danced from the time I was four, we had to put it up a lot and having it long made it easier. Except I did not like the way my mom fixed it for recitals. There were very specific ways to do it and mom never got it quite right, at least according to me. We argued about it quite a bit and she would get frustrated when after getting it all pinned up, I would point out a bump or tell her it was crooked.
 
Like her mom – my grandmother – she finally told me if I did not stop complaining, I could fix it myself, or cut it all off. She would threaten to cut it but never did. So, I did start doing my own hair.
 
In middle school my friends started dying their hair and I wanted to do that too but my mom would not let me. She wouldn’t let my brother dye his either. Not sure why but she would not budge.
 
When I graduated from high school last summer, I put a red streak in it and thought my mom might get mad. But she didn’t. When I turned 18 mom said I could make my own decisions about things like that. Truthfully, it did not look very good after a few days. She probably knew that would happen.
 
When I could not get the color to stay longer than a week, I grew out that one piece of colored hair because I was going to OU in the fall and I thought it looked kinda trashy to have that one weird piece of blonde hair. I like the color of my hair. And I have a lot of it.
 
For a long time I got my hair cut at whatever salon did not require appointments. Now, I go to my mom’s hair stylist in Oklahoma City and I really like that because he knows me and what I like. And she doesn’t have “mom” hair so I trust that he will always do a good job.
 
I am over wanting to dye my hair.  I like it just the way it is.

Oh, Joy! Lucky Us!: A Multi-Generational, Collaborative, Family Essay-Writing Contest

The contest submission deadline has passed. The winner(s) will be announced at the PLS Big Read Kick-Off at the Norman Embassy Suites on March 29 and names will be posted online (update: winners announced here: Big Read Essay Winners).

• The essay contest is designed to celebrate the book The Joy Luck Club through a collaborative process and product of a parent-child writing team.

• The essay should focus on the multi-generational perceptions of a single family experience, such as a holiday, fashion, conflict, expectation, rite of passage.

• Essays may be between 1000-5000 words per submission (submissions can be from 1-3 authors writing on a theme) and may be written in collaboration or in tandem as long as both contributors explore the same theme or concept, albeit from different points of view. A single author should address the topic from differing points of view with distinctly different voices.

• Previously published material is ineligible.

• Employees of the Pioneer Library System and their immediate family members are not eligible to enter the competition.

• Authors should submit biographical information with their essays, limited to one paragraph. In addition, authors should submit a brief statement about what inspired them to write the essay.

• Submissions will be made via the PLS Big Read web site.

• Winners will be determined through a blind review by a panel of writing professionals.

• Entrants maintain their rights to intellectual property, but agree to grant the Pioneer Library System limited rights to use the work to promote and support the PLS Big Read: The Joy Luck Club.

• Deadline for submission is 11:59 p.m. Wednesday, March 14, 2012.

• Contest participants will be invited to attend the PLS Big Read Kick-Off at the Norman Embassy Suites on March 29 where the winner will be announced.

• Winner(s) will receive a complimentary ticket to the PLS Foundation brunch with Amy Tan, Saturday, April 28.

• Winning and selected entries may be included in PLS Big Read: The Joy Luck Club promotional materials and discussion guides including publication online and/or PLS publications.

Click to view the sample essay

Click to submit your essay