We've all had those days when our hair won't behave, and we've all had those dreadful haircuts that make us want to take a pair of scissors to our hairdresser.  My first bad haircut was in the fifth grade when the Dorothy Hamill wedge haircut was all the rage.  Unfortunately the nice lady at the Yellow Balloon Children's Hair Salon had no idea who Dorothy Hamill was or how to cut a wedge haircut, and I pretty much got a buzz cut.

 In the seventh grade I went for the Barbara Streisand perm.  I sat patiently under blazing hot bright red heat lamps while the dozens of rods with my hair tightly wound around them dried.  I smelled like I had taken a dip in the sewer.  My eyes watered and the day went on for weeks, or so it seemed, before I and my hair were released from the salon.  I looked more like Roseanne Roseannadanna than I cared to admit and my school photos for that year met with with the trash compactor.  There would be no wallet sized photographic evidence for my mother to carry about and show off to all the other mothers whose children had perfect hair.

My next disastrous hair day was also my sixteenth birthday.  The whole day was just one bout of bad news after another.  First I went to get my driver's license, something I had been lusting after  since the day I turned 15 ½ and had received my Learner's Permit.  However, when I got to the Department of Motor Vehicles I was short one of the necessary papers to be able to take my test.  The temper tantrum I threw only served to highlight that toddlers going through the terrible twos are rank amateurs.  That disastrous day was compounded when my mother took me to get my hair done in a Hungarian woman's garage-based salon.  My mother, the heiress, has always had a knack for finding cheap hairstylists. I wanted a body-wave on my roots so that my short hairstyle wouldn't hang quite so limply.  All the posh girls at my school were having this done and the Hungarian hairdresser assured me she could give me this same treatment.  Let's just say that it was a good thing I wasn't issued my license that day, as I would most likely have driven myself off a cliff to avoid being seen with that hair.  Think Frankenstein's pubic hair.

Over the years I have had my hair butchered by not only the Hungarian, but by celebrity hairstylist Nicky Clarke who was all the rage in London in the 90's and charged me over $150 to make me look worse than if I had done it myself. I have had my hair dyed purple by a Sebastian color specialist when I asked for it to be dyed auburn.  I once went to one of those dreadful places where the stylist is called something like "Mr. Frederic" and all the furniture is Louis XIV and the wallpaper is gold flocked.  I asked "Mr. Frederic" for some highlights and he dutifully pulled my locks through a cap and slapped on a little bleach.  When he unveiled my hair I was nicely frosted, not highlighted, and I looked like a young Nancy Reagan. Which is, after all, every college girl's dream.

The one constant in all of these bad hair situations has been that I was keenly aware that my hair was bad.  I knew that the style or the color was not flattering nor fashionable.  I was painfully aware of these truths.  Even today, when my hair is most often pulled up in a knot at the back of my head and my gray roots are begging for a splash of color, I know good hair from bad and I know which I have.  So why then doesn't Kate Gosselin?  Why does she persist?  She's got a publicist and an agent to guide her, so why don't they tell her that only Alfalfa of the Little Rascal's fame can pull off having hair stick straight up in the back?  It just makes me want to slap her silly.

But today I have discovered, or shall I say rediscovered as I have tried to block this foolish young man from my mind, the penultimate bad hair style. It is a hairstyle that has nearly seized control of a television show.  I speak of none other than Chad Rogers from the Bravo TV series Million Dollar Listing.

If you have ever been foolhardy enough to watch this show for more than 30 seconds, you will discover that much of Chad's segments are spent watching him fix his hair.  He is forever spraying it with so much hairspray that we can safely accuse him of causing the hole in the Ozone Layer; or the cameras catch him adjusting the strands that hang just below his eyebrows so that they lay "just right."  I honestly can't tell if the boy suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or Obsessive Vanity Disorder.  Either way it is hard to watch.  Chad's hair has such a life of it's own that it even has a Facebook page. No, really.