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Had fashions in the late 1960s been different, I would not have the strength of character I have today. I was born with complicated hair - thick, unmanageable, curly hair (and not the good kind of curly, either - the Andie McDowell/Julianna Margulies-kind of curly). My coarse, wiry and frizzy locks would be en vogue today; stylists spend considerable time crafting such looks for runway models. No, mine was a look that sent me reeling in horror from the mirror. It was my misfortune to grow up in the era of Jean Shrimpton, and I had complicated hair.

Hairstyles at the time were long, sleek and straight, like Shrimpton's, or cropped pixie caps, like the iconic cut Vidal Sassoon created for Mia Farrow. (Both blondes, I might add.) But hope arrives in the form of a beautiful brunette named Marlo Thomas - That Girl - who wears her smooth, glossy hair in a flip with bangs. The fact that Marlo is Italian and Lebanese, just like me, with a father with whom I'd once been photographed, clinches the deal. That brown-haired girl will be my role model. God knows I need one. I have complicated hair.

"You have to suffer to be beautiful."

That's my godmother, Aunt Fannie, speaking. It's 1968, and I'm in the seventh grade. We're having our class pictures taken in a few days, and my parents drive me to her house to have my hair done.

Perhaps I should explain.

Aunt Fannie was a beautician. (That's what they called hair stylists in those days.) My godfather, Uncle Bill, a gifted carpenter, turned one of their basement rooms into a salon for her. My father drove my mother over to have her hair done each week, with me in tow. With school-picture day looming, I had begged and pleaded with my parents to let Aunt Fannie cut my hair so that I would have bangs and a flip, just like That Girl.

Soon Aunt Fannie's fingers are flying across my head, the silver scissors like a magician's wand-snip! snip! snip! Sitting in the swivel chair, I'm turned from the mirror, unable to see my idol's impeccable hairdo slowly emerge from my tangled Medusa mane. When she spins me around, I am stunned.

I look awful.

None of us took into account the density of my thick frizz when calibrating the outcome of my longed-for flip hairdo with bangs. With the flip flopped, I resemble a bereft Labradoodle in shock.

I don't want you thinking that I spent my entire childhood in tears, but I have to tell you that I cried. Not a full-throated cry - just a whimper, with a steady stream running down my cheeks.

"Isn't - isn't there anything you can do?" I ask my godmother, sniffling. Flat irons had not yet been invented, so that was out. She thinks a moment, then brightens.

"We can straighten it!"

My father, who had been watching television in the other room, walks by just in time to hear this. "Not if I have anything to say about it!" he thunders. "She has beautiful hair. Or she did. You never should have cut it in the first place."

"But George, look at her," my mother says. "She can't go around looking like this!"

"I can't go around looking like this, Daddy." He should know where I stand on the matter.

The tension in the air is as thick as pomade. Aunt Fannie busies herself by rearranging her hair clip drawer while my parents exchange words. I escape upstairs to soothe my nerves with a tall glass of 7-Up. When I come back down, the charged atmosphere has calmed. I'll never know who convinced him - my mother or Aunt Fannie - but my father backs down. Aunt Fannie is mixing the chemicals that will solve the crisis and turn me into "That Girl" for my school pictures.

"This stuff stinks!" I cry when she begins stirring the mixture near me. And when she starts combing the goop through my hair, my eyes begin to water - and not from tears, either. "It burns!"

"You have to suffer to be beautiful," she replies, a sage in a pink smock.

I don't remember how long I sat in that chair. It seemed like months. But finally I am directed to the shampoo bowl, where the cool spray of water soothes away the stinging, rotten-egg smell of the chemicals. Aunt Fannie washes and conditions my hair and combs it through. I am entranced. What I touch feels smooth and sleek; I've never experienced such a sensation before. My head looks smaller, too. It isn't my hair anymore; it doesn't even feel like me anymore. It's better - new and improved, as the commercials say.

Aunt Fannie sets my hair in rollers and puts me under the dryer, where I flip through the latest movie magazines like the sophisticate I imagine myself to be. When I'm dry - cheeks red-hot from the heated air, rolled hair crisp to the touch - Aunt Fannie ushers me back to the swivel chair and begins unpinning the rollers, vigorously brushing out my strange, beautiful, uncomplicated hair.

It gleams. It shines. I've never seen anything like it. She sprays hairspray all over me - the air is thick with it. I sneeze and cough. But I look beautiful. I had to suffer to get there.

But look: just look at that girl!

- Marci Rich

Marci Rich blogs at The Midlife Second Wife and The Huffington Post. She won a BlogHer Voices of the Year award in 2012, the same year The Midlife Second Wife was named one of the top seven blogs for women 50-plus by The Huffington Post.