The Minnesota Farm Woman

Many years ago, and perhaps even a few more than many, I was a 1970’s teenager. Back in those days, the hair style for many of us was straight, parted in the middle, and freshly shampooed. Sometimes getting it straight involved rolling it up in repurposed frozen orange juice cans pinned with bobby pins. Quite a difference from my mother’s generation of rolled up tight pin curls and covered with a bandanna or the 1960’s bouffant and heavily sprayed beehives. Sometimes, I washed my hair twice a day so it would be just right. My shampoo was not my mother’s Prell concentrate that squirted like jelly out of a tube, but something that smelled of things other than just plain clean with names like Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific or Herbal Essence. With two teenage girls in the house, I’m sure we went through a lot of shampoo. I remember my sister and I taking turns choosing the latest scent or flavor. Speaking of flavors, some of the shampoos sounded good enough to eat or drink, with names such as Earth Born Apricot, Body on Tap, which was made with beer, and Lemon Up, which supposedly had the juice of a whole lemon in it. Even though I was a blonde, I heard that lemon juice would make my hair blonder, so one summer I squirted lemon juice in my hair every day and sat out in the sun. When that didn’t work, I surreptitiously (because my mother told me not to) sprayed Sun In or Lemon-Go-Lightly (I can’t remember which) in my hair and sat in the sun, bleaching it just a tiny shade lighter, thinking Mom wouldn’t notice. She did. There was a shampoo called Long and Silky, and another, probably from the same marketing genius, called Short and Sassy. The length of my hair was somewhere in between, so I bought both. I remember a brand called Agree that “stopped the greasies” and when my parents’ house sold, I found a bright pink flower-power bottle of Young ‘N Free in the back of a cabinet that was so 70’s kitsch that I had to laugh out loud. If we wanted something different, it was Bright Side or Protein 21, but if we wanted simple, it was plain old Johnson’s Baby Shampoo or Love’s Baby Soft Shampoo. Love’s Baby Soft had a body spray also, so when we weren’t smelling like a fruit salad, many of us walked around smelling like babies’ behinds. Charlie’s Angels, whose actresses were known for their lovely shiny hair, advertised Faberge shampoo, and the Angel with the hair we all wanted, Farrah Fawcett, even had a shampoo of her own, coincidently called Farrah Fawcett Shampoo. I’m pretty sure that with that gorgeous head of hair she sold plenty of the stuff, but that is one shampoo that I never bought, probably knowing that with my fine, thin Scandinavian hair it would be futile to even give it a try. Since I lived right across the street from the high school, I would get up at the very last minute, wash my hair in the kitchen sink, and run out the door with wet hair. During the winter months, my hair would freeze solid by the time I got there. It may have been frozen, but it was squeaky clean and gee, it did smell terrific!