My Oprah Angel Network Book Club Aha Moment regarding this experience was learning always to tell the truth, to be up-front, and not to lie on behalf of, or to, your anchorwoman. If you do it the truthful way, sometimes you will get what you want and other times you will not, but your reputation and your word will always be good.
Oh, but that was only Strike One.
A couple of years later, I somehow booked another interview with Oprah and planned to fly to Chicago for the day with Ms. Zahn to shoot it at Harpo Productions. Was Oprah so highly busy that she’d completely forgotten the bad blood between us? Or was she so highly evolved that she’d absolved me of my sins? Either way, the thrill of having a second chance with Oprah could only be matched by my enthusiasm for another newsworthy event occurring at the same time. Newsworthy to me, anyway. After growing my hair out from a buzz cut to a Jewfro to an early nineties ponytail, I was finally ready to cut it off, and my executive producer had greenlit a “producer makeover segment” featuring me and a colleague, Judy Hole.
I deemed my haircut to be as important, or of more importance, than any live segment I’d ever produced. Thankfully my coworkers also viewed my ponytail with similar gravity. And so it was Beverly Hills hairstylist Christophe, who had just given President Bill Clinton that notorious two-hundred-dollar, runway-closing, air-traffic-jamming scandal of a haircut on the tarmac at LAX, who would be my barber.
Thoughts of the upcoming haircut consumed me in the same way I’d later obsess over preparing for my stint onstage with the B-52s, meaning I completely overhyped this as an epic event to anyone who’d listen. If you think I’m a li’l bit of a windbag now, imagine me talking about my hair 24/7. I don’t know how anyone tolerated me. Around that time I ran into photographer Spencer Tunick at a party. Tunick is now known around the world for taking large-scale nude photographs in public places (say, 5,200 naked people in front of the Sydney Opera House). In those days, he was taking solo nude shots in public places, and he encouraged me to document my lustrous long curls before they were shorn. I agreed—it was important (for the arts) to memorialize my tresses hanging on my naked shoulders somewhere in Manhattan.
Days before the haircut, I met Tunick at 6 a.m. (he always shot in the wee hours to minimize chances of arrest or complaints by passersby) in front of the New York Public Library. I was, as instructed, wearing sweatpants so I wouldn’t have any lines on my waist from underwear. (The thought that goes into every work of art is just something, isn’t it?) He had me climb up onto one of the two lions guarding the library; I’m not sure whether it was the lion named Patience or the lion named Fortitude, but it seems pretty obvious that he was trying to draw an artistic parallel between the permanence of the lion’s mane and the impending slaughter of mine. Or he just wanted to take some skin shots of a dumb kid on a statue. He instructed me to quickly strip off my sweats and lean my bare ass against the stone. Sorry, Patience or Fortitude. The photographer then directed me to assume various poses at the base of the lion, while I tried to convey any feeling other than “I’m freezing” with only gooseflesh as a prop and not a fluffer in sight. Then, like most other nude adventures, we were done in about four minutes.
The night before the big makeover, I barely slept. The next morning I went to the studio to get my “before” photo taken (with my clothes on this time), and my physical condition would’ve been diagnosed by any doctor as “barfy.” Throughout this entire tribulating trial, I spent every spare non-hair moment scrambling to set up the final details for Paula Zahn’s interview with Oprah Winfrey in her study at Harpo. I was determined not to screw things up this time. Yet the interview would take place on the same afternoon as my own live reveal, and believe it or not, the haircut loomed larger and more nerve-racking than seeing Oprah again.
I stumbled into the L’Oréal salon for my appointment, and when they offered me coffee or tea, I requested Valium. Christophe studied my face and gave me three options:
1. A Sting crew cut.
2. Short on the sides, curly on top.
3. Straighten it “and see what happens.”
He had mentioned straightening the day before and I’d wigged out, but two friends in the know separately reassured me that this was the way to go. So without listening closely to the “and see what happens,” I chose door number three, and he cut that tail right off. It felt good, so I relaxed a bit as he quickly shaped some kind of flip look on my head, and I noticed a hairdo emerging that seemed like it could be a winner. Then came the straightening, which was very painful.
I’d taken Christophe’s advice to “see what happens,” and in the end, the master had developed a look for me that I felt would have been at home on the pages of GQ. A look that I could style with or without a pompadour, my option. If it’s hard for you to understand my gaiety at the very notion of having a hair option, you are a person who has never had Jewish hair. I freaked out again, this time in a good way. I met six friends at Coffee Shop in Union Square for an unveiling and got rave reviews. I felt so hot that I laughed at my foolish self for every second that I’d wasted worrying.
The next morning, I was picked up at 5:45 for my live reveal
