Me, My Hair, and I by editor Elizabeth Benedict

I should go to get a decent, reasonable haircut. It seemed that my hair needs were too simple—a cut, shampoo, and blow-dry every three or four months—for her to send me to the stylists and colorists she patronized. My hair has remained dark, as was my father’s hair when he passed away at age seventy-five.
    I know my hair is thinning. When I run into old friends visiting the United States from Calcutta, some will exclaim, with the shocking frankness that only Indian friends you have grown up with can, “Bharati, you’re getting bald! Good grief, what happened!” There is a medical explanation: recently I’ve been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and the medications I have been put on list “loss of hair” as a likely side effect. Maybe I should go back to using amla hair oil, which is said to control rheumatoid arthritis. Maybe I should get a wig. I mentioned the wig idea to Amy Tan over an Italian dinner in Sausalito the night before she was to leave for New York to launch
Th
e Valley of Amazement
, her most recent novel. We’ve known each other for over twenty years, and she has always come up with suggestions for coping, no matter the nature of the distress. She mailed me a human-hair wig within weeks of that dinner. The hair is lustrous, shoulder length. I take the wig out of the box it came in and caress the silky, supple strands. Apparently, the wig will have to be cut and styled to suit me. Amy has promised to help me find the right stylists. For every problem, there’s a solution. I am ready for the next phase of this hair tale: exciting wig adventures with the help of a good friend.

My Thick Hair
    EMMA GILBEY KELLER
    M y current hairstyle is a shaggy bob. I take it quite seriously. Seriously enough to have a board on Pinterest called “Shaggy Bob,” where I add pictures of versions I like. For some reason the board has quite a few followers. They’re not my followers (I have loads of boards that are completely ignored) but Shaggy Bob’s, so I guess I’m not alone out there in liking this particular style.
    What’s a shaggy bob? A bob is the neat haircut ending somewhere between ear, chin, and collarbone (think Coco Chanel, Anna Wintour, and various Hillary Clintons), and a shaggy bob is the same thing with layers cut into it for “texture.” You might think of this as a scruffy rather than a shaggy bob, but for those of us with a lot of hair, it’s the difference between a pyramid shaped wedge (scruffy) and a style that can actually be quite chic (shaggy).
    I take my bob seriously enough to get it cut at Sally Hershberger Downtown (but not by Sally Hershberger herself—that would be overdoing it). Sally was the hairdresser who cut the Meg Ryan version of the shaggy bob that became all the rage back in the day. It’s the nineties hair of
When Harry Met Sally
and
You’ve Got Mail
. Goodness, that’s over twenty years ago now and Sally’s still going strong. I don’t want to boast (or age myself more than I have to), but I was getting shaggy bobs in Tribeca as a twentysomething in the late eighties when I first moved to New York from London—for free, by students on certain Saturday mornings at edgy downtown salons on West Broadway.
    These days, James at Sally H. cuts my hair. Two good things about him: (1) He can cut the best shaggy bob on the planet. (2) He’s a Brit. So when I’m getting my hair done, we talk about the King’s Road and hot chocolate and Marmite and all the other things Brits talk about when they’re in the USA. The other day, when I was in the salon getting my hair cut, Sally was there too. She works off to one side behind a partition so you can’t see her. I knew she was there, though, because they were playing Sally music, Burt Bacharach, instead of whatever they normally play that I never recognize because I’m too old. At that precise moment, I thought I was in