Dreadlocks & Movies

On Saturday, December 5th, I went to Maun and employed the excellent Mma T to crochet my hair into dreadlocks. Yes, folks, that's right: crochet! Using the tiniest crochet hook in the world, its handle wrapped with innumerable rubber bands to give her a better grip, this unfailingly cheerful woman spent eleven hours knotting my hair into dreadlocks.

Set up on the floor of my friend G's house, we watched five movies between the hours of 3:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m.:

1. Children of Men, which was not exactly what I'd expected, but becomes more and more wonderful the more I think about it. I was expecting the wonder to be in the plot, but instead it was all in the atmosphere and the imagination of the dystopian world that was created. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given Cuaron's earlier films... I ought to go rewatch Great Expectations. When I watched it the first time, I think I was too distracted by the stirrings of adolescent hormones to really appreciate it.

2. Garden State, which was just as charming as I had been led to expect. It's the New Jersey I always believed was out there and never quite found... A particular brand of delightful, quirky, utterly unique Americana that I will always continue to search for. You have to go looking for the boats at the bottoms of abandoned shopping mall construction pits, or even the strange loopholes in hardware store return policies (that would NEVER happen in Botswana!)... Those bizarre and beautiful "only in America" phenomena. I remember going to look for things like that with a friend at Princeton. We drove miles and miles on a freezing cold fall afternoon, searching for a cavernous and reputedly satanic abandoned train tunnel that we'd read about on the internet. In the end, all we found was some offensive graffitti and a barbed-wire fence. Luckily we made up for the disappointment with another American phenomenon: really good, really cheap pizza.

3. Crank, which was just as terrible as I thought it would be, and therefore just as awesome. Apparently you don't need a big budget to create ridiculous action scenes. Jason Statham will never do Shakespeare, but he knows his place in the Hollywood pantheon and he fills those boots to perfection. (I am also, admittedly, a sucker for appallingly bad action movies.)

4. 88 Minutes, awful though it could have been so good. Sorry, Al Pacino.

5. The Fifth Element, which I have seen many times before and still love. Bruce Willis is the man, Milla Jovovich is an unearthly beauty, and apparently the costumes were designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier!?!

Halfway through.

Complete!! I've always wanted dreadlocks.

A brief history of Jenn's Hair: I did not cut it till the age of 19. Prior to that, it was gently trimmed, first at a place in Victoria called Tickety-Do's, which provided its pint-sized clientele with tiny personal TVs to watch Disney movies while their hair was cut. They also had a picture book of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," which started my lifelong obsession with Jessica Rabbit. When I outgrew Tickety-Do's (which was later revealed to be a money-laundering front for some local drug dealers), my mother trimmed my hair for me. I always intended to cut it - my vague plan was to wait till the moment was right, get dreadlocks in the whole waist-length mane, and later shave it all off . However, one day in Kenya, on the biology department's Semester in the Field trip (which began this whole blog!), I thought idly to myself, "what if I cut off all my hair, right now?" After that, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and a few days later we had an impromptu fireside ceremony in which, armed with a head lamp and a pair of scissors, my friend Mark chopped off nineteen years of hair.

Since then, I've had a few "real" haircuts; I've shaved it off to a half-inch again; I've cut it myself, reaching around the back blindly with a pair of scissors and hoping for the best; and now I've finally fulfilled that original dream of dreadlocks. I'm very happy with them. It now remains to be seen how long it takes before I get tired of them and shave my head once more! (The next time, I intend to Bic it to the skin.)