Lois Lane and the Incredibly Bad Hair Day

By Chris Carr <carrcmh@yahoo.co.uk>

Rated: G

Submitted: January 2004

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Introduction: This was originally written as a response to the haircut challenge posted on the Lois and Clark Fanfic Message Boards (http://www.lcficmbs.com/)way back in back in April 2003. Consequently, you can blame it on Tank, Bethy and a fit of insanity. There's no real plot here, and it was written in about half an hour. (If you don't think it is any good, at least you now know why!)

Thanks to LabRat for GEing. :)

Disclaimer: This story has been written for fun, not profit. No attempt is being made to infringe any existing copyrights held by December 3rd Productions, Warner Bros, D C Comics, or anybody else.

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Have you ever noticed that, just when you find a good hair stylist, she gets pregnant and goes on maternity leave? And then she'll decide that staying at home with the baby is better than going back to work? Okay, so I shouldn't blame a woman for doing that. I mean, I value family.

Seriously.

I do.

Okay, okay. So, I admit, I didn't, not for a long time. But then I met Clark, met his parents, got married, and began to think that all that family garbage might actually not be garbage after all. And you know already that I want a kid of my - our - own, right? So I do think family is important.

But that doesn't make it any less galling when Sandra or Felicity or Liza or Barbara or, in this case, Mandy, suddenly disappears off the face of the planet... or, at least, into the alternate reality of a life of sleepless nights, diapers, poop and sick.

H'm. Did I say I wanted a kid?

Wow. That just goes to show the power of love and hormones over rationality, doesn't it?

I reckon that each and every disastrous haircut I've had over the last few years can be put down to my having to break in a new stylist. There was that fiasco with the highlights, for example. Not me at all. And it was obvious that Clark didn't like it much, either. I mean, why else would he say, "Honey, I'd love you even if you were bald"?

Oh, and don't even get me started on that do which plastered my hair down onto my scalp! What on earth was... What was her name again? Maggie. That's it. Maggie. What was *Maggie* thinking of when she did that? It was like wearing a helmet, she'd lacquered it down so hard! It took me half a bottle of shampoo and an hour in the shower to get the lacquer out.

Actually, now I think about it, I wasn't alone in that shower: Clark "helped" me wash that one out.

Maybe that hairdo did have some merit, after all.

The semi-permanent *was* pretty much of a mistake, though. It looked like one of those awful rainbow clown wigs - you know, the really cheap ones you get from joke shops - only without the rainbow. Oh, yeah. Dark chestnut poodle curls. That's a look every woman wants.

Nothing, however, has ever been as bad as this latest disaster.

Let me explain.

Mandy was a very good stylist, so it was only ever going to be a matter of time before she went on maternity leave. Of course, the inevitable happened, and I, as one of her clients, got passed on to Patricia. The salon's manageress told me that Patricia was experienced and that I had nothing to worry about. Patricia, she assured me, would do a *fantastic* job.

What she didn't tell me was that Patricia would give me the merest hint of a trim, a really clever blow- dry, and that my hair would have grown out in the space of a week.

But, you know, it wasn't like it was a *total* disaster. In fact, for all of forty-eight hours, it actually looked pretty good. So, I decided not to give up on Patricia immediately. I thought that, with a little advice and training, she had the potential to do better.

Boy, was I ever wrong about that!

You know what I learned today? Never, *ever*, EVER tell a hair-dresser that you'd like a do that grows out more slowly than it takes for your cheque to clear.

I told her that.

Big mistake.

Huge.

Colossal!

She sat me down on the chair and began to cut.

Did I say "cut"? Hah! Prune, more like!

Okay, so I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to what she was doing; at least I wasn't to begin with. But I couldn't have seen the back of my head while she was snipping away there, anyway, and by the time she moved round to the front it was already far too late to stop her. Not unless I wanted to have one of those really foul early nineties teen-boy cuts. Do you remember those? Ledges cut into the back of the head and bangs hanging down past the nose? *Ugh!*

Patricia cut the last strands, zapped my hair with the blow-dryer and announced with no small amount of smug satisfaction, "There! *That* won't grow out in a week!"

I looked in the mirror and... I looked like a porcupine.

Okay, so I looked like a porcupine with very short quills, but a porcupine, nonetheless. I had - still have - a half-inch layer of fuzz on my head, kind of like an expensive doormat. You know the ones I mean, right? The really wiry ones that are especially good at getting mud off the bottom of your shoes?

It even kind of feels the same.

It's ghastly.

At least the shouting was therapeutic. I felt much better after that.

Of course, Clark has been really sweet about the whole thing. He says he likes the way the porcupine feels, and maybe he really does. He says it tickles his palm when he tries to stroke it. I don't think he likes the way it looks, though.

Certainly no one else does. I think it's the only time I've ever seen Ralph speechless. When Jimmy saw me, his eyes bugged out of his head and he blurted out, "What *happened!?*"

Perry... Well, Perry stared hard for a few minutes then gave me a very big hug. "I'm so sorry," he said.

But at least Perry's right about one thing. It *is* only hair. And it will grow out.

Eventually.

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