Hair, There, Everywhere
Anita Garten is scrunched like a human pretzel in the back of her husband’s British Sterling. She has no choice but to hoof it in 95-degree downtown temps at 8 at night in a hoop-skirted, hip-bucketed Marie Antoinette-meets-Christian Lacroix gown. But the costume, is half--and bubba, we do mean half--her problem. Her hair, you see, is so McSupersized, so Titanic, so Viagraously altitudinous that it’s Godzillian.
In Texas, SIZE . . . DOES . . . MATTER.
Garten has tried crimping, crinkling and crumbling herself into an itsy-bitsy thing so that not one follicle on the tippy-top of her poufy hairdo falls out of place. Ceron, the one-named salon-meister to Houston’s elite, would not be amused. It took him three hours to create Garten’s whiplashingly high coif. But not even reclining as far back as the front seat will go can remedy this dilemma.
Houston, we have a problem.
In the state of bigger is better, of high-neck beer and tall tales, there’s a saying: “Texas’ most precious natural resource is Big Hair, honey.”
So Garten does what any sensible woman would do when her pump-covered feet are hanging out the window, her parachute-shaped white dress is suffocating her face, and her manicured hands are cramping from protecting her pearled, plumed and parrot-adorned ‘do.
She yells at her hubby to stop the dang car, dang it, and “let me out right now!”--and then walks the four remaining blocks past winos and lurching onlookers to the party of the season: the sixth annual Hair Ball.
The fund-raiser for the Lawndale Art and Performance Center is an event so bizarre, it’s chic; so whacked out, it’s artfully in; so uppity, it’s, well, hair-raising.
It’s been chaired by Lyle Lovett, featured on “Oprah,” declared one of People magazine’s best parties of the year and honored with an official Texas Big Hair Day back in 1993 by then-Gov. Ann Richards. This year, avant-garde director William Klein--an American filmmaker in Paris--and crew of nine taped the event for a documentary about rituals, called “The Messiah.”
Indeed, if anything, the Hair Ball epitomizes a rite in Texas--a right to Big Hair.
The ball, literally, is the height of the social season, attracting people from all over--artists and art patrons, social workers and social mavens, lawyers and law enforcers, and big guns like Tom Hogan, president of Foley’s Department Store, and Bob Cavnar, CFO of El Paso Energy. And, lest we forget, their big-wigged wives.
This is, after all, a gal’s gala--an Aqua Net dream on steroids where high doorways are a must for heaps of lacquered locks.
This past Saturday night, more than 300 of Houston’s well-heeled and deep-pocketed party-goers--at $150 a pop--raised teasing and spraying to a new art form.
Every strand added to the night’s 18th-century France theme of “Let them eat cake: An evening of ridicule, rebellion and revolution.”
And roots.
*
Hair was frizzed and frazzled, curled and swirled. Locks were braided and dreaded. There was out-to-here hair and down-to-there hair, tornado hair, volcano hair, speed-bump hair, Marge Simpson hair and King Kong-sized Kramer hair.
It was teased to the heavens, dyed shocking blue, powdered white and decadently decorated in conehead style with partridges, doves, bunnies, ribbon, vines, ivy, branches, ostrich and peacock feathers, bird nests, dangling Christmas tree ornaments, toys found under the kid’s bed and, for one couple, shaped into an elegant swan and a regal ram’s head of horns.
Mounds of hair were held together with carpet glue, Velcro, duct tape, pantyhose, chicken wire, hot wax, bobby pins, paper clips, toothpicks, chopsticks, skewers, staples, rope, rubber bands, tubes, straps, twisties, bungee cords and Styrofoam.
And stylists who accompanied their socialites could be seen doing medieval makeup and hair repair throughout the night. In the words of Jose Eber stylist James Bryant, who created several pieces for the gala: “We’re talking years of drag queen secrets, baby.”
And it just wasn’t the women who donned high-rise hair, taking them from a petite 5 feet, 4 inches to a nose-bleeding queen-sized 8 feet plus in height. Men, too, unabashedly--shamelessly--got into the froufrou act.
Christopher Gongolas, a financial software expert, whipped up his creation two hours before the party.
“I thought of it late this afternoon,” he says of his fuzzy Afro so behemoth that he took up two seats at the dinner table. He attracted a circle of gawkers at the Two Houston Center building, where revelers occupied three floors of wide open spaces and paraded their headpieces on escalators.
On top of his wig he rigged a strawberry cake topped with whipped cream.
“I got the cake at a grocery store on the way home,” he says. He dropped in at a hair salon and asked for some freshly clipped hair still on the floor. At home, he placed a single slice of the cake on a platter and sprinkled it with the hair. At the party he put himself together in the parking lot and walked around announcing: “Let them eat cake!”
Computer software marketer Michael R. Piana says attending the Hair Ball had been on the list of things to do in his life. Figuring he’s already climbed the ancient Incan ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru, conquering the Hair Ball would be a snap.
So this evening, Piana fulfilled that fancy with a full head of yak hair that looked as if it had been teased with a stun gun. He parted the piece down the middle and glued on miniature plastic Napoleon figures ready for war.
“The French Revolution has gone to my head,” he says, stooping over to show off his wild creation and then rejoining others on the dance floor.
In Texas, there’s another saying: “If there’s one thing that Texans do well, it’s to poke fun at themselves.”
For sure, y’all, Texans--God bless them--have a gift for self-parody. The Hair Ball was created to spoof Houston’s big social scene and many of the city’s movers and shakers.
“You know what? Nobody talks about people from Indiana. But they sure do talk about us Texans,” Lawndale’s board president Gracie Cavnar says while admiring her head of puff ‘n’ fluff.
“This is the tallest hair I’ve had yet,” she says, her own head of natural red hair worked into a jiffy-popped creation of polyester filling, three wigs, gigantic butterflies, fake pearls, ostrich feathers, a bird nest and pheasant that all measures 3 1/2 feet high and 2 feet wide. Cavnar has to limbo-rock to enter a room.
“My husband had to pick me up from the salon in our Land Cruiser. I had to get perpendicular, honey, from the salon to home and from home to the party,” she says at the mane event, with her friends, Garten and Terrie Hogan towering nearby. The three, collectively known as the Dangerous Liaisons, were finalists in the grand parade that honored the best of the best--or in this case--the biggest of the biggest--with trophies for their upswept styles.
It took stylist Ceron two hours to do Terrie Hogan’s hair. Hogan’s husband drove her home at 7 mph in the only car that could accommodate the daring ‘do: a convertible. And the trio--nicknamed Godzilla, Rodan and Mothra by an obviously jealous socialite--took home the coveted Miss Charm award, which they promptly presented to Ceron, who held it like an Oscar and promised to display it at his work station.
Nancy Littlejohn, the gala’s chairwoman and owner of a fine-arts gallery, walked away with the Marie Award for her locks that were incorporated into a black swan figurine and a designer costume with a mini-hooped skirt “that turns into a slinky when I sit down.”
Her friend Janice Freeman did drag in a man’s costume and curling ram’s horns wrapped in hair. And the two were accompanied by a studly stable boy fanning them. More than $100 in hair spray and $400 in wigs were used for the two pieces created by the three-member team of Bryant, Jeff Brandon and Damon Constantine of the Eber salon.
“This is a cruising gala,” says Littlejohn of the mixing and mingling--and networking. “It’s an excuse for grown-ups to act up, a combination of prom night and Halloween.”
The Hair Ball also has gone where no other ball has dared. Through the years it has attracted a younger, hipper and well-moneyed new socialite crowd that wants more for its bucks than just a meal and a boring speaker. But organizers say they have a tough balancing act on their hands: how to keep the older and decidedly deeper-pocketed crowd--which is very traditional in how it parties--coming back.
“We don’t want to frighten them away,” says Littlejohn, who had “Swan Lake” performing on her noggin. A tasseled, leather-covered dominatrix-like riding whip doubled as a much-needed scratcher for those hard-to-itch spots.
All righty then.
Cindy Blass, an artist, crafted her creation out of a dozen stuffed bunnies.
“By 9 p.m., I’ll have 24,” she quips. Her husband, John, a commodities broker, affixed baby doll heads into his wig of white and called it “Off With Their Heads, Dammit!”
*
Mary Paulette, president of the Art Colony Assn., walked around with Marie Antoinette’s head--actually a mannequin’s in a basket, dripping with fake blood and angel hair pasta made to look like human innards.
“Head cheese, anyone? How about you, bubba?” she asks in her Abilene twang, going from table to table.
When asked about the origins of Texas big hair, Paulette explains: “The women--they’re gonna really hate me for this--but when you can get Aqua Net hair spray for 89 cents a can, then you’ve got big hair.”
Victoria and Marshal Lightman--she in a Hindenburg-sized production featuring an angelic mask and wings, he in an IMAX-high wig with a devil’s face--are the ball’s founding follicles.
Named the gala’s king and queen, both ponder the connection--the historical roots, shall we say--between Big Hair and Texas.
It’s almost like having a religious experience, Victoria Lightman tries to explain.
In Texas, there’s another saying, adds Marshal: “The higher the hair, the closer to God.”
Amen, bubba.
* Quintanilla, a native Texan, attended this year’s Hair Ball in a tasteful Louis XVI curly-swirly hairpiece that required its own plane ticket for the trip home.
