Gnome!

While we're on the subject of garden ornaments...

LOOK!  It's a gnome!

Nah!  Not really.  It's just my sister again.  She's the one who noticed her resemblance to a garden gnome.  I completely missed the similarities.

I guess I was distracted by the look in her eyes. I can see she's pissed off. Even all these years later, I can see I'm in deep shit.  Imagine what it was like to experience that look in person! 

We both have similar memories of home perms.  Standing on your toes with your head over the sink.  Cold chemicals being dribbled on each individual curler.  Sitting around with a bag on your head while water and solution dripped down your neck. The smell.  The stinging.   

What my sister doesn't seem to remember is that her hair always looked great after a perm.  In fact, it was her success that convinced me to try a home perm myself.  What I didn't factor in was that we have VERY different hair.  Where she got curls, I got frizz.  It was really, really bad.  I insisted that my ever-patient mom take me to buy a hot oil treatment to try to 'fix' it.  It did not improve things.  Instead, my poor, over-processed hair sucked up all that oil and held on to it.  I had greasy, fried hair for days.

You'd think that would have put me off perms.  Nope.  That's how much I wanted curls.  I just left the perms to the professionals after that.

Salon perms were somewhat better, but at least at home, there wouldn't be too many witnesses to your bag-and-curler headpiece.  Unless, of course, someone snapped a picture and shared it thirty years later for everyone on the interwebs to see.