By Pennie Azarcon dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

“PARA kang si Bella Flores!”

This, is usually hurled at me by assorted white-knuckled siblings holding their water, while I mopped the bathroom floor. “No, you shall not pass! Wait till I’m through and the floor dries. You should have gone yesterday,” I would declare, summoning my inner villain. And that is why they often called me Herr Bella to my face.

Now there’s a compliment. I’ve always been enamored with kontrabidas, these strong-willed women who know exactly what they want, and that is to make life miserable for the often insipid leading lady. Why, I don’t mind coming across as a kontrabida myself, thanks to being the second in a brood of six and having to holler to be heard. No wonder I identify so much with Zeny Zabala, Carol Varga, and oh yes, Bella of the blood-curdling brow-beating bluster. (Right, so I’m dating myself. Well, no one else will, ho ho ho!)

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By Eric S. Caruncho, Staff Writer
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

PEOPLE now talk about martial law as a dark period in the distant past when our democratic rights were taken away from us by a repressive totalitarian regime. Soldiers came in the night to round up activists, opposition politicians and anyone who might pose a threat to the new order and threw them in jail. The free media was shut down, and the only information came from the regime’s mouthpieces in the controlled press.

I didn’t care about any of that, at least not at the time. Martial law’s impact on me was more direct, and more personal.

I was a high school senior in September of 1972, and adhered to that wing of the youth culture that supposedly subscribed to the unholy trinity of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll (well, two out of three ain’t bad). Like most of my peers, I wore my hair down to my shoulders. In fact, I hadn’t had a haircut in two years.

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By Leica Carpo, Publisher
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

THE WILDEST thing I ever did with my hair was color it myself — not with the pretty packaged supermarket-bought hair color but with my own concoction of petroleum jelly and crushed metallic blue eye shadow. I was a “punk” and it seemed like the edgy thing to do at the time. Needless to say, the result was dead cool and sufficiently fierce as to earn me the rep of “punk princess.”

My signature spiky haphazardly shorn bluish tinged locks were my way of rebelling against the long black straight hair of the time. I was a controlled rebel because though I loved dancing until dawn and drinking alcohol, I kept that GPA up and never got into drugs, smoking or Mohawks. I will always remember the “shock” I caused among my pretty long straight haired classmates when I first arrived at the quadrangle with my cropped short. I enjoyed that moment immensely.

But the craziest hair moment I have had was not something I did to my own hair but to my friend Maru. She had beautiful wavy shoulder length hair which, during a mad moment of post break-up grief, she allowed me to chop up to scalp length with a pair of house scissors! She sported a couple of bald spots for months after that which, strangely enough, did not wreck our friendship but strengthened it.

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By Pennie Azarcon dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

UP UNTIL a year ago, I hated my hair. Fine and limp, it slumped on my scalp like a furry roadkill, two tweezers’ pull away from becoming extinct. Always a cause for despair, the scraggly strands initially tortured Nanay who had fancied herself her daughters’ keepers — at least when it came to their profligate hair. She was our childhood Delilah, the infidel who inveigled us with 50 centavos — a small fortune that bought a week’s worth of halo-halo at that time — just to have our locks chopped.

Long unruly hair is unsightly, she scolded, a nesting place for parasites. One of these days, she’d warn my third sister who was constantly scratching her particularly thick mop, “those lice would grow so fat they’d sprout wings and carry you off.” Actually, it was one prospect we had secretly looked forward to– a fantastical journey that would lift us out of our bahay-eskwela-simbahan (home-school-church) routine. But it never happened and soon enough, Nanay took another tack. Laying on the guilt for which all mothers are particularly skilled at, she nagged, Doesn’t it bother us that she was being pilloried by other people for being an unfit mother, one who couldn’t even keep her children’s tresses under control?

Well that worked, at least for some time.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

MY mother told me that, as a child, I had long curly locks, angelic hair. Growing up, the thin, wavy hair took second priority to the fact that I had a huge forehead. It was a point boys my age always made fun of, so I tended to overcompensate — by developing a strange combover to cover the forehead. As a result, my hair looked different depending on which side you looked at it. Worse, in puberty, I decided that I wanted to have a mustache, so I not only had an oddly sloping haircut, but also a mustache at 15, making me look for all the world like Jose Rizal.

In college, I got the itch to grow my hair. So I did. I had chin-length hair and would tie it up in the worst ponytail ever conceived. It was during that time that I developed new respect for girls, because I have no idea how they managed to keep all that hair in order. As much as I tended to fuss over my hair (despite appearances), I actually had a face that looked the same regardless of what hairdo I had.

So I kind of just threw caution to the wind and got a crazy haircut. It was an approximation of corn rows, but because I didn’t want to braid my hair (and not shampoo? Eech!) I just had the barber carve rows into my hair. Weird, I know. Together with some very odd facial hair and an earring, I felt street. What I should have felt was screech. “Iverson!” I heard that a lot. Of course, I had no idea that they were all making fun of me. The funny part was seeing friends visibly try to contain the disgust on their faces as they asked why in the world I decided to get my hair cut that way. “Because I can,” I answered honestly.

After that little follicle debacle, I went for the least fussy haircut possible: I simply had it all cut off. This almost-bald look really worked. I had it for years — to the point where, frankly, I got a bit bored.

Last year, I decided to start growing my hair again, just a bit. My office mates were shocked. Many of them actually thought I was already bald. Seriously. In any case, I’m enjoying, for the first time in my life, having remarkably normal hair. There is, after all, no evidence of the strange hairdos I allegedly had in my youth (all the photographs have been destroyed and witnesses silenced), so I am perfectly content with my current hairdo. Besides, my wife likes it, and that’s good enough for me.

For more tangled tales and other hairy stories, check out the April 20 issue of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine.