Big hair is an AFRO-disiac

BY BELINDA M. PASCHAL

I have afro envy.

With the afro making a comeback in the last few years, I’ve often thought, "Sure would be nice to not have to wonder how I’m gonna fix my hair today." Unfortunately, my hair is of a length, weight and texture that doesn’t lend itself well to such a hairstyle. Oh, I can rock the "half-fro," wherein the hair fans out on either side a la Roseanne Rosannadanna, but I can’t achieve the altitude required for adequate afro-ness.

I want an afro of such gargantuan proportions that I’d have to turn sideways to walk through a door, like O.J. Simpson’s Nordberg in Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult. I want a mystical mountain of magic like Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo’s in the Shonen Jump anime series.

When I was 8, the reigning queen of blaxploitation filmdom was Pam Grier, who boasted a halo of hair that made the Jackson 5 look like the Hair Club for Men. Nobody messed aroun’ with Foxy Brown, ‘cos she packed a revolver. In her afro! In Coffy, Grier was "the baddest one-chick hit squad that ever hit town," according to movie posters. Anyone doubting her badness came away minus a few fingers, thanks to the razor blades hidden in her ‘fro – an essential accessory when engaging in hair-pulling catfights. I had no desire to use my hair as a weapons arsenal; I just wanted to look like the baddest one-chick hit squad that ever hit the fourth grade.

Around the same time, there was Tamara Dobson – sort of a decaf Coffy, if you will. At 6’2, Dobson was the tallest leading lady in film, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, which didn’t factor in the groovy platforms and funkadelic ‘fro that put Dobson near 7 feet tall in Cleopatra Jones.

"Hair's like a woman. You treat it good and it treats you good," says Doodlebug, a character in the movie. "You gotta hold it, caress it and love it." But no amount of holding, caressing and loving would give me an awesome blossom like the one on Cleo’s head.

Being afro-tastic transcends race and ethnicity. Just look at the cast of Welcome Back, Kotter. With the exception of Vinnie Barbarino, the Sweathogs were a veritable United Nations of afro-osity. Mr. Kotter (Jewish), Freddie "Boom Boom" Washington (black), and Juan Epstein (Puerto Rican Jew) all were fine specimens of afro-hood. I’m not sure what Arnold Horshack’s ancestry was, but he definitely inherited the afro gene.

If I want to achieve even a semi-respectable facsimile of an afro, I have two options. One would be to buzz my locks to about 3-4 inches, the length at which it begins to form single curls instead of spirals. But this would leave me with what we referred to in my childhood as a "TWA" – Teeny-Weeny Afro – thus defeating the purpose.

The alternative would be to torture my hair with no fewer than 283 tightly wound, microscopic curlers and enough Aqua Net to obliterate the ozone layer. It hardly seems worth the effort, since half a day of humidity would transform me from Erykah Badu to Erykah Ba-don’t.