When I was in elementary school, my mother began sleeping with her hair swathed in toilet tissue topped with a brown nylon hairnet. My mother hadn’t always slept with her hair wrapped in toilet paper, that is until she began using lemon Jell-O to keep her hairdo fresh and perky.

The lemon Jell-O was a 1960’s version of hair sculpting lotion, a pre-cursor to hair mousse and wax, all of which hadn’t been invented. I believe my mom had read about this alternative use for Jell-O in a women’s magazine: the writer claimed that applying a small amount of liquid Jell-O to ones’ hair before rolling it onto curlers would make your hairdo last much longer and give one’s hair a bouncy, shiny appearance.

In the 1950’s and early 1960’s, most women wore their short to medium length hair curled with the use of plastic rollers. Most nights or days depending on ones schedule, woman would spend anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes, winding their hair around 1 to 1 1/2 inch plastic cylinders and bobby pinning them into place. It was quite a procedure and anyone who could afford it went to Betty’s Beauty Salon on Broad Street to have it done once a week. Yes, back then, women washed their hair only once a week.

My 29 year old mother couldn’t afford the weekly beauty parlor and besides both my brother and I were around most of the day making it both logistically and financially impossible. So as always with my mom, she found a short cut to the professional ‘do’ she wanted.

I remember clearly how my mom took one of the lemon Jell-O boxes out of our pantry, snipped open a corner of the envelope of gelatin, then poured a teaspoon into a tea cup which she then filled with hot water. Often she let me stir the mixture until all of the powder dissolved. Then up to the bathroom we trooped. I wasn’t going to miss this weekly entertainment.

First, my mother draped a towel over her shoulders so as not to get the super sticky and sickeningly sweet smelling stuff all over her cloths. Then standing in front of the mirror over the sink, she would pick up a piece of hair with one hand as she dipped her comb into the tea cup of jello with the other hand. Then quickly so as not to drip too much, she would comb it through her hair before rolling it around a metallic brown colored roller. Finally, I would hand her first one then another bobby pin that she would use to secure both sides of the roller. She had to work fast so that the jell didn’t jell. In between my bobby pin job, I mostly watched in awe, thinking about how I, too, one day would be rolling my hair in lemon Jell-O and rollers.

Using lemon Jell-O was crucial because of the bland color and less pungent smell. Strawberry, raspberry, and orange were never used for obvious reasons: no one wanted to smell like a super strong imitation flavor or have a red or orange tint added to their hair.

My favorite time was when my mom’s hair was finally dry. It took hours to dry before the late 1960’s bonnet hairdryers. We would troop back up to the bathroom and begin the process of unwinding my mom’s black hair. I was in charge of taking each roller and booby pin and placing then back in their proper places. I watched in wonder as each curled section of hair stood rock hard in a perfect cylinder shape.

After all of the rollers were removed, it was a marvel to see. Two dozen stiff shiny cylinders in perfectly lined rows covered my mother’s head. She looked like a totally different person. Her head seemed so much smaller without the bush of bouncy shiny curls. She looked like a Martian whose stiff hair cylinders were awaiting contact from her mother planet.

I always asked to touch them before the inevitable ‘combing out’. And my mother almost always said yes. They felt like hard-shelled fibers, smelled like too strong imitation lemon, and looked like white-flecked shiny black tubes. The white flecks were from the Jell-O. Thus a proper combing out was of the utmost importance. My mother worked hard, combing, brushing, and rubbing her hair to remove those white specks. She didn’t want to walk around looking like she had a massive dandruff problem.

Finally, all of the Jell-O was removed and her hair was ready for the final step. An atomic cloud of throat choking aerosol hairspray was applied over and over and over again. Now my mom’s hairdo looked almost like she had come out of Betty’s Beauty Parlor down on Broad Street. The almost was because of the lingering white flecks that occasionally showered down on my mother’s navy blue wool cardigan for the rest of day.

And thus the necessity of sleeping with the toilet tissue and hairnet. In order to keep her hairdo up to snuff for an entire week, my mother had discovered the toilet tissue/hairnet method of preservation. The toilet tissue swathed carefully and then covered gingerly with a hairnet each night ensured that with just a bit of teasing, combing and spraying each morning, my mom could look like she had just stepped out of Betty’s Beauty Parlor on Broad Street. And no one but mom, my brother, and I would be the wiser.