Mama Fails Hair 101

Most of you know that I'm a dance mom.  My daughter is on competition dance teams.  As part of the dance mom job, I have to know how to apply my daughter's stage makeup, and fix her hair into a multitude of hairstyles.  Today was practice day.  I took my $100 worth of makeup supplies and hair stuff to the dance studio to show the owner of the store that I could actually do this.

Ha.

We started with the makeup.  Do you know how hard it is to apply liquid eyeliner to somebody else's twitching eye?

"You have to stay still, or I'm going to end up lining your ears!" I told my daughter.

She made a face, which of course didn't help matters.

Then I tried to curl her eyelashes.  "Mom!" she said.  "You're going to poke my eye out!"

"Sorry about that.  Here.  You do it yourself."

"What do I do?"

"Put your eyelashes in the thing and squeeze."

Yeah.

Next was the mineral powder.  I put some on a brush and knocked off the access.  Of course my daughter started gagging.  "Mom, what are you doing?  This is like Mount Saint Helen erupting!"

"Deal with it," I said.

Somehow I managed to paint her face in such a way that was acceptable to the dance store owner.  "Pass," the lady said, and signed off on our chart that it was good.   

I breathed  a sigh of relief.

On to the hair.  The style was a very special twist with a side bun:  the signature dance studio hair do.  It is very important that I learn to master this.  Being the genius I am, I forgot the gel and hair net. 

"Mom!" my daughter complained.  "How could you forget those?"

I shrugged.  "We'll borrow somebody's gel."  (Not that they'd want used hair gel back.)

That's what we did, but unfortunately, it wasn't the good stuff.  It was more like water.  I parted my daughter's  extremely long hair and went to work.  I tried very hard to twist the hair just right, and position the bun against the side of my daughter's head, just behind the ear.  But of course, without the right stuff, it just didn't work right.  Nevertheless,  I sprayed it down with a half a can of hair spray.  "That'll have to do," I said and marched her over to the dance store owner for inspection.

She gave me a look.  I knew it wasn't going to be good news.  "First of all, the twist is supposed to start higher on the head," she said.

Okay.  Fine.

She continued.  "Second, I see a wispy (term for hair out of place)."

I nodded.  Couldn't argue that one.  There was indeed one hair out of place.

"Third, where is your hair net?"

"At home," I said.

"You failed," said the owner.  "Come back another day and try it again."

I'm crushed.  What an utter failure I am.   I'm going to go have a pity party now.  Would somebody else like to take over my job as a dance mom?