Sandy's Hair: Your Decision Made My Life
- Bill Fortenberry
- 5 days ago
- 17 min read
Dear Sandy,
You may not even remember me. I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t, but forty-seven years ago, you made a singular decision that forever changed my life. This letter is a long-overdue thank-you. I sure hope you get it.
It was 1978 or 1979. That would make you about eleven or twelve. I was fourteen or fifteen.
You had scraped together enough money to get your hair cut like Farrah Fawcett that spring or summer, but the style required upkeep. Your family was as poor as mine. There wasn’t a whole lot of money available for hair salons and such.
It was time for school to start back up, and you wanted to look your best. For reasons I can only speculate about, you asked me to cut your hair.
I didn’t ask you why you asked me to cut it, but I can guess. It could have been because I was the neighbor who didn’t play sports and had more girl-friends than guy friends. It could have been because I was the smart kid on our road. I mean, if you can’t afford a haircut from a professional and your options are limited, maybe the kid who makes As and understands the basics of physics is a good second choice — if I was your second choice. I may have been way further down the list.
We both lived on that short stretch of road populated with four-room Craftsman-style rental houses. I didn’t know it then, but I later learned that the community (if that’s even the right word for this spot marked only by stop signs) was named for a farming family. At one time, the patriarch had owned farmland and hired people to work his fields. He built houses for his sharecroppers to live in, not as a gesture of kindness, but as a way to keep the farmworkers he needed nearby and beholding to him. When farming grew less profitable, he built a store, some apartments, a café and a gas station.
Families like yours and mine paid him rent, bought their groceries at his store, ate at his café, got their gas at his station and used the payphone outside his office. I remember the green, faux-leather ledger he used to keep track of all the debts his renters owed him. This was the place where many dreams died, but you and I didn’t know that, at least not then.
If you do remember me, you’ll remember that I was the smart kid in our little community. When the other 10-year-olds were smoking cigarettes in their front yards, I was inside our house — the white clapboard house on the hill — reading the World Book Encyclopedia. When the other kids were cussin’ and throwing rocks at each other in the street, I was watching Nixon defeat McGovern and counting the election cycles until I could vote.
I remember that you and your folks moved into the house my family had vacated. We were a family of three in that little green house. I don’t know how your mama and daddy squeezed all seven of y’all into those four rooms.
I imagine other people looked down on us with pity. My daddy had been an alcoholic. Both your parents had a fondness for the bottle, but that was life. We made the best of it back then, I reckon.
Years later, I would tell middle school students to take an honest look at their lives and the lives of their parents.
“If you like what you see, and that is what you want your life to look like when you’re an adult, ask them what they did, and do what they did,” I told them. “But, if you don’t want your life to look like that, ask them what they did and do something different.”
For me, that meant graduating high school and going to college. My daddy never learned to read or write; I saw education as the key to a better life. Neither of my parents graduated high school; I thought a diploma would take me out of this hopeless place. No one in my family had ever gone to college; I figured a college degree would keep me out of there.
I guess I got a little sidetracked there. Sorry.
I cut your hair on your front porch. You sat in a chrome and plastic dinette chair, a towel draped around your neck and shoulders. Armed with a pair of sewing scissors and a plastic comb, I applied the critical thinking I had learned in math and science to your hair. I lifted a section of your hair and cut an inch or so, then moved to another to do the same. It was all guess work, based on an in-the-moment hypothesis I had established: If I cut the same amount of hair from each of your many layers, shouldn’t it turn out like the original haircut?
All your brothers and sisters — Audie, Frankie, Patsy and Diane — watched our progression. I don’t remember the conversation, but I do remember the laughter; although now that I think about it, it was probably nervous laughter on both our parts.
Sandy, you placed a tremendous amount of trust in my hands. Your simple invitation, born from a desire to look your best on the first day of school was a leap of faith I didn’t see coming. You trusted me.
My friend Alicia pointed out to me this truth of trust. I honestly hadn’t ever considered the value of that trust, but I see it now.
I remember watching wisp after blond wisp falling onto the towel, you and I both hoping for the best, neither of us prepared for the alternative. In hindsight, the act of parting, combing, measuring and cutting your hair felt, well, natural. After one final snip, I brushed back your corn silk layers, hoping your hair would fall into place. I removed the towel and gave you a round mirror, the kind with a plastic handle, for you to see the result.
We liked it. You liked it.
Sandy, your unexpected request (and the improbable result) was the first strand in a hair story that has been braided throughout my whole life. Like I said, I owe you.
After your hair turned out so well, both your sisters and your mama asked me to cut their hair. Those front-porch cuts were successful, and my mama sensed something bigger had happened.
“This is God’s will for your life,” she told me, a kind of wisdom that can only come from a deep faith in Jesus and a sharecropper’s life. She had picked enough cotton, sewn enough dresses, and ironed enough of other people’s clothes that, in her estimation, any legitimate door that promised money on the other side is one you want to walk through. Add Jesus to that hardscrabble mix, and you get prophecy.
She told me that God had blessed me with this talent I didn’t know I had and that I needed to put it to use.
My mama, daddy and I had met Jesus three years earlier at a brown-carpet altar during a summer-long church revival in Waco. The white-haired, charismatic, larger-than-life evangelist preached about The Great Tribulation, being left behind in The Rapture to confront the Mark of the Beast, and the sulfurous fires of Hell. Tears and sweat streamed down his face as he told us God had a plan for our lives, and our little family surrendered to His plan. It wasn’t a hard decision, at least not on my part. I saw firsthand the miraculous change in my daddy. The week before he’d been an alcoholic, unable to refuse any chance to taste cheap liquor, but he stood up from that altar sober. How could I not follow the God who could do that in my daddy?
The church we went to was filled with signs and wonders. The organist born without an ear claimed she had perfect hearing. Worshippers danced in the aisle to her rhythmic music, her constantly swaying right leg keeping the beat on the piano-like bass pedals. These were chair-hopping, tongues-talking, Holy-Ghost-and-hell-fire services. Everything meant something. The founder of this fringe denomination had even concocted a Christian horoscope with each birth month associated with one of the twelve tribes of Israel and a birthstone corresponding to the high priest’s breast plate. I think I was a Dan or maybe an Asher. I don’t remember what my stone was. It might have been beryl.
Given my mama’s still-new religious devotion, I can understand why she thought your request was a God-ordained intervention, but I had my doubts. The church didn’t permit women to get their hair cut, wear makeup or wear pants and insisted that men keep their hair short: above the collar and ears. If this was the way, the truth and the life, barbering might have been blessed by the Good Lord, but cutting Farrah wings for you? I didn’t think so.
We moved from that house when I was a junior in high school. I can’t remember whether you still lived at the bottom of the hill. You know what happens in high school. Paths diverge. People lose touch. I don’t remember the last time I saw you. Since Audie and I were the same age, I remember seeing him in the halls at school, but at some point, it seems like y’all just faded away, or maybe I drifted.
You probably won’t be surprised that I graduated near the top of my class. By then I knew I wanted to be a writer or a journalist — some kind of storyteller. College was the obvious next step. Except it wasn’t.
You see, I may have been smart, but I was still broke. I was accepted to my dream school, but I couldn’t afford the tuition or the cost of living in a dorm. I still sometimes wonder why none of my teachers, none of our counselors, no one’s parents told me that there were programs to help me pay for college or that I would qualify for all of them.
I did get a $500 scholarship from the National Honor Society, and I knew what I had to do.
When I went to the school’s front office to pick up the check, the secretary asked me where I was going to college.
Do you remember her? She was the last of the school marms. Wire-rimmed glasses framed her small, pale face, which was creased with stern, thin lips and topped with a tightly rolled cloud of white hair.
“I’m going to cosmetology school,” I told her.
I could feel her judgment and her disappointment as she stared at me through her glasses.
What a waste.
She didn’t say those words, but I knew that was what she was thinking. But she didn’t know that I had a plan. How could she? I had decided to learn how to use this God-given hair talent of mine to pay for college.
The scholarship paid in full my tuition to the Fulbright University of Beauty, including a kit that included a rubber mannequin head with straight blond hair and a bulky rectangular case filled with everything I needed to actually cut and style someone’s hair: A barber’s comb; a rat-tail comb; a cream-colored, Bakelite hairbrush with stiff black bristles; a set of color-coded rollers of various sizes used to set women’s hair; a teasing comb; a pair of scissors (shears is the preferred term in the industry) and a thick textbook that supposedly contained everything I needed to know.
I don’t know if you still live in around here or ever come back to visit, but if you do, you’ll know where the cosmetology school used to be. It operated in a building now occupied by the Little Caesars. Yep, the place where I learned to properly execute a precision haircut, give a client a permanent wave and add blond highlights, now sells a grab-and-go cheese pizza for five bucks. Can you believe it?
Honestly, I felt humiliated when anyone asked what I was doing since high school. Mama, daddy and my closest friends knew, but I was embarrassed to say or write the name: F-u-l-b-r-i-g-h-t-U-n-i-v-e-r-s-i-t-y-o-f-B-e-a-u-t-y.
University? Please. It wasn’t even a college. It was a trade school, and calling it anything else was just stupid. They could have at least called it the Fulbright School of Hair Science. That would have made a lot more sense (or been a lot less embarrassing).
Sandy, for most of my elementary, junior high and high school years I was called “sissy,” “gay,” “queer” or “homo,” and back then, those kinds of labels were a death knell. It didn’t matter that those words weren’t true. People talked. People assumed, and people judged. There was no safe place in the world for anyone who could even possibly be gay and there was no safe place for a guy like me: a straight man who cut hair, didn’t play sports and didn’t care anything about hunting, fishing or dirt-track racing.
I was used to people calling me a sissy and making fun of me, but there was one specific day when I no longer felt safe at school. Our PE teacher called me “sissy” in fourth grade when I failed miserably at soccer. I didn’t cry, and I didn’t tell mama when I got home.
I don’t know if you ever saw it, but my mama had a bad temper. If other kids made fun of me she’d just tell me they were jealous of me. I knew she was wrong. They weren’t jealous. They were mean. But this was a teacher. There was no telling what she’d do.
When I was five years old, I watched her grab the beehive hairdo of my uncle’s ex-wife. My mama pulled her into a ditch and beat the unholy hell out of her. The former sister-in-law had parked on the road shoulder in front of the duplex we lived in and said something about my uncle that ticked off my mama. In two seconds flat she had crossed our gravel yard, crossed the ditch and let woman know she’d best keep her mouth shut. I remember two teenage girls, probably high school students driving home after class, pulled over. They were screaming and crying.
“Somebody stop her! She’s gonna kill her!” they said.
My aunt lived next door.
“Leave her alone,” she told them. “She deserves it.”
The homophobic labels and names that started in elementary school followed me beyond high school, and my side hustle served only to feed my tormenters. To the rest of the world, starting “beauty school” was the fulfillment of every hateful word.
I remember most everything I learned at Fulbright, but I struggle remembering the experience. I enjoyed learning the craft, but I was so concerned about what other people thought and were saying that I failed to truly connect with the people there.
Sandy, what I want you to know is that when you asked me to cut your hair, you set into motion a side hustle that helped me have the life I have now. You are one of the most influential and impactful people in my lifetime. I should have found you many years ago and told you that.
“Doing hair,” as the old-school beauty shop owners called it back in the day, bought gas for the cars I drove in high school. It paid for my undergrad degree, and it paid for the 1965 Ford Mustang that was the coolest car I ever owned. Hair provided the down payment on the first house I ever bought, a little peach-colored Jim Walters home sitting on the side of Mill's Mountain, and it paid the down payment on the only house my parents ever owned. Cutting and styling hair supplemented my income when I was a newspaper reporter, where I barely earned enough money to pay my bills.
My first novel, “Lint Head,” is based on one of my first customers at the beauty shop I worked at. Brenda Lee was a never-married denim-mill worker who came every Saturday to get her hair shampooed and set so that she would look her best for church on Sunday. She once told me she was going to the 1982 World’s Fair to meet a boy she’d once loved in high school. She tried to hitchhike her way from to Knoxville, but never even made it out of the county. I knew I would one day write her story.
Cutting your hair, Sandy, started me on the road that led to my wife, Lisa.
It was 1985. I was a senior in college and working weekends at the beauty shop, a jaundiced, wood-paneled setup with floors the color of overripe bananas, harvest gold chairs and yellow Formica countertops.
I shampooed her hair to remove the 1980s hairspray and cut her hair in a style we called a bi-level. That sounds so much fancier than “mullet,” but at the end of the day, that’s what it was: cropped above her ears with lots of layers in front to form impossibly big bangs, then permanently waved into a massive profusion of blond curls that reached to her shoulder blades.
Lisa and I were instant friends, but, honestly, she was not at all the picture I had in my 22-year-old mind for a lifetime companion. She managed a convenience store, not a Fortune 500 company. She was wearing blue jeans and tennis shoes. I was looking for Liz Claiborne and high heels.
I really liked her eyes. They were pale blue and glowed in the light, and when our relationship turned romantic, the first thing I bought her was a pair of aquamarine earrings that matched her eyes.
It's a fallacy that seeing your bride on your wedding day before the ceremony is bad luck. It was well after midnight when I finished meticulously rolling her long blond hair in preparation for the baby’s breath crown she would wear.
We had finished with rehearsal and the cookout that followed. While she sat at the kitchen table, I created small horizontal sections of hair, spraying each with Aquanet before covering the ends in paper and rolling her hair on white permanent wave rollers. I repeated this probably fifty times, the happiest man on the planet. And now that I think about it, rolling her hair at our kitchen table isn’t that far away from cutting your hair while you sat in a dinette chair.
Lisa and I got married in a historic church. The curator said the thumbprints of the men who built the church are still visible in the orange-red bricks that were made on site. When Lisa appeared at the end of the aisle on the arm of her brother, I cried so hard that my pastor had to steady me with a firm grip on my shoulder. She was wearing the string of pearls I had given her as a wedding gift. A cascade of blond curls fell over her lace-covered shoulders. Outside, the October sky matched her eyes.
Lisa and I have been married for 32 years. Her eyes are still blue, and they can see into your soul. She can spot a liar or a scam artist a mile away. She knows when someone is hurting, and she knows when someone is hiding something.
While I’ve spent my whole life worrying about what other people think, Lisa has no such compulsion. She is authentic, sincere, as real as you can get.
She is an artist. Where I see blue, she sees shades of cerulean, indigo, sapphire and cobalt.
She is my rock.
When the sculptor she worked for closed his business in 2009, Lisa wasn’t afraid, but I was. We had two kids and a mortgage, and I was drowning. A shift in brain chemicals a few years earlier had pulled me into a bottomless sinkhole with no rope and no hope. Lisa was my ladder.
Here’s an example: The first drug the doctor prescribed to treat my depression was Effexor, dispensed with confidence and a promise of better days. The days were not better. I went to bed and didn’t want to get back out. I didn’t want our kids around me. I didn’t want Lisa to touch me. When I told my doctor the depression was worse, he switched me to Wellbutrin, a much better drug, but not the cure I had hoped for. My problem was bigger than medicine or science, and Lisa knew it before I did.
After a while, I noticed a change.
“I feel better,” I remember telling Lisa.
“I prayed for you while you were sleeping,” she said.
I still cry when I think about that moment. Because she is sincere and authentic, I know that she prayed for me. Because she is selfless and without pretense, I know her prayers were answered.
No one else has cut, permed or colored Lisa’s hair since we met forty years ago.
I did some quick math. Forty years times an average of eight haircuts per year comes out to about 320 haircuts. It took me six years — or about 48 haircuts — to ask her to marry me. I thought love produced fireworks and goosebumps. It didn’t happen like that. Lisa very simply became my best friend, the person I didn’t have to impress, the person I could always depend on.
I know her loving heart and her creative mind, but thanks to you, I also know that her natural hair color is 7N on the Clairol chart. I know that she likes 12A highlights with some extra 9A depth. She once asked to try platinum blond. She hated it. She also tried red. I returned her to blond the same night.
She hates the cowlick that sits above her left eye. She likes the versatility of layers, but appreciates the extra weight that comes with a style that is all one length. She is frustrated by the fact that humidity will make her hair curl no matter how much effort she puts into straightening it, and she loves getting to shop at the pro-shops that only licensed cosmetologists can shop at.
Sandy, when you asked me to cut your hair all those years ago, you were leading me to love.
“Thank you,” is woefully inadequate.
Lisa and I have built a life together. We’ve been married for more than 32 years. We have two amazing kids. Our son is professional musician who travels the world, sharing his art with others. Our daughter is an educator who is making a difference in young lives.
Ears would not hear Ethan’s music and children would not be learning kindness had it not been for you.
But your decision didn’t just affect me and my family.
Hair stylists are technicians, chemists and therapists. The salon chair is where relationships are formed and secrets are shared. It is a safe space where clients can be vain, scared, daring or insecure. Hair is sacred and the salon is the altar where faith is put into action. You helped teach me that.
I met Odette when I was working at my first hair-styling job. She was stylish with perfect nails and carefully coiffed ash-blond hair. After I cut her hair the first time, Odette was my customer for life. She never wanted more than a half inch cut, usually less. She liked her hair above her shoulders but below her blouse collar, and she wanted it stacked just slightly to add volume in the back.
When her husband left her for another woman, she became more protective of her hair. When I stopped working at a salon, she came to my house for haircuts, telling me about her son, her grandchildren, her retirement, her health and her loneliness.
When her former boss noticed that something seemed “off,” he called me because I was the person Odette talked about most. Within a couple of years of that phone call, Odette could not recognize her son or her grandchildren, but she knew me. I got prescriptions and groceries for her and answered her calls when she was certain someone had been in her house moving things around.
I visited her in the memory care unit not long before she died. Her hair was halfway down her back, no longer blond, but an ashen gray. She didn’t remember me, but she smiled sheepishly and ran an arthritic hand along the length of her hair when I told her I used to be her stylist and I knew she didn’t like more than half an inch removed.
I was there for Odette, all because of you, Sandy.
One of the things I learned in school is that your hair is unique to you, and it reveals more about you than you may realize. Every strand of hair contains your DNA. An analysis of your hair can show the environmental elements you have encountered and whether you’ve used drugs — even nicotine — within the past 90 days. Your diet, your stress and your trauma are all visible in your hair.
I once had a client whose hair had a very clear break in its structure about halfway along its length. The break was not due to a chemical treatment or color change. Knowing hair grows about a half-inch per month, I asked her what had happened about six months earlier. Her eyes widened. I think she thought I was a soothsayer or a prophet. She had undergone a traumatic surgery several months earlier and asked how I knew.
Her hair told me.
I once led a discussion in my Sunday School about the importance of a single decision. Valerie, a wise and talented woman in my class, illustrated that point:
When she was in her junior year of high school she attended a football game. Rain began to fall just as the game was over. She was dreading walking to her car. At that very moment Gordon appeared at her side carrying an umbrella. He walked her to her car and asked her out.
Valerie and Gordon have been married for almost fifty years. They have two children and four grandchildren. Their beautiful life can be traced to Gordon’s decision to bring an umbrella to the football game.
Sandy, it’s been almost five decades since you asked me to cut your hair. Your decision is why I have the amazing life that I now have.
I hope life has been as kind to you as it has been to me. I think it’s important to let people know their value. I want you to know that my life would not be the same had it not been for you. I said it before, and I will say it again: You don’t know it, but you are, without doubt, one of the most influential, most impactful people in my life, and I am grateful.
Sincerely yours,
Bill
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