June 23, 2005 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Eight years ago, when doctors first told Patricia Wynn Brown that she had melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer, two thoughts flashed through her head: Oh, God, what if I lose my hair? Followed by, Oh, God, what if I die?
This locks-over-life ranking of her fears speaks volumes about Ms. Brown’s obsession with hair — her own and everybody else’s. A child of the towering hairdo days of the 1950s and ‘60s, when “life was all about our hair,” Ms. Brown, a writer, finds the stuff on our heads equal parts “comedic and tragic.” As a girl she idolized actress Annette Funicello, mainly because the Beach Blanket Bingo star kept her hair perfect even while surfing.
As it turned out, tragedy was avoided during her cancer scare, as the only things lost were the diseased cells, removed in a timely and successful operation. But what could be described as Ms. Brown’s hair-brained look on life emerged stronger than ever and was re-energized with a noble new purpose.
Take her actions one Sunday evening last month at Moretti’s Italian restaurant here in the leafy suburbs of her native town. Ms. Brown — her short, auburn tresses tucked beneath a mammoth, red beehive wig — flitted around the confines ordering about a gaggle of black-clad nuns.
“Where do you want the absent-minded pope?” a man in a flowing cassock asked Ms. Brown, while she sought to corral the habit-wearing “sisters” into position for a group snapshot. (“Come on nuns, get tight,” she implored.) Adding a sonic backdrop to those goings-on, Father Presley (played by a local musician, Dave Bott, sweating under a sort of pompadour-on-steroids wig) pounded out “Brown Eyed Girl” on a Yamaha keyboard.
Welcome to Hair Folly-cles at Our Lady of Perpetually Glorious Hairdos High. Another round of Ms. Brown’s Hair Theater was about to begin.
This night’s chaos was for a cause: The all-volunteer fund-raising event benefited the Hair Theater Fund, which Ms. Brown established four years ago to provide free wigs to needy Ohio women who have lost their hair during cancer therapy. A capacity crowd of some 130 people paid $45-a-head for dinner and the show. More than 135 women (and one 10-year-old girl) have received free wigs since Ms. Brown began the fund-raising shows in 2002.
Ms. Brown started Hair Theater as a commercial enterprise in 2000, performing in front of church groups, women’s clubs, and corporate meetings.
Not to be confused with the Broadway musical Hair, just what Hair Theater is is a bit hard to pin down. Promotional materials dub it a “chit-chat comedy performance/audience-participation piece.” Ms. Brown evokes the more-the-merrier rule during shows, even categorizing volunteers as “hair nets” (women), “chippenhair dancers” (men), and “bobby pins” (kids).
The Hair Folly-cles show is built around a tress-focused traipse through Ms. Brown’s own Catholic schoolgirl days — back when, she explains, girls used rattail combs to “jack their hair up to Jesus,” to the dismay of the nuns, who equated lofty hair with low morals. (“Hairdo detentions,” we learn, were not unheard of.)
The loosely scripted shows sport names such as If Your Hairdos Could Talk and Much Ado About Hairdos and often use photographs and tales from Ms. Brown’s personal “hair-story” (bad perms and all) as a starting point for a round of hair-centric skits, improvisations, and games — with a little singing and dancing thrown in for good measure.
The show at Moretti’s unfolded with Ms. Brown — appropriately attired in a plaid schoolgirl uniform — discussing the symptoms of Hair-Obsession Syndrome, leading audience members through a round of Name That Patron Saint (St. Martin de Porres is the patron saint of hairdressers), and then striking up the All Nun Kazoo Band.
Moretti’s is usually closed Sundays. But on this Sunday night, and eight times before, Tim Moretti, the restaurant’s owner and chef, agreed to sacrifice the day off and donate a round of dinners. “I lost my sister to breast cancer,” he said.
And there’s a less reflective reason why he allowed Ms. Brown to bring her Hair Theater into his bistro. “She’s hilarious and does such a good job with it,” he said, adding with an approving grin that his wife, Ellen Moretti, was one of the nuns in that night’s show.
Watching Ms. Brown as the evening’s energetic ringmaster and literal bigwig, it’s hard to believe she was so stricken with stage fright while in a high-school play that she often forgot her one and only line. She says her creative confidence emerged first through a successful writing career, one that has included a column for the Columbus Live weekly newspaper, and two books, Mama Culpa and Hair-a-Baloo.
But even Ms. Brown’s personality was overshadowed when the show took a poignant turn and Mary Capretta mounted the stage. She is a cancer patient who received a wig through the Hair Theater Fund. “Saying thank you isn’t enough,” she said, with damp eyes. “But doesn’t it look great?” she added, brightening and referencing the stylish light blonde strands framing her face.
While Ms. Brown’s own encounter with cancer gives her a certain sensitivity to the cause, it wasn’t the main impetus for creating the wig fund. Rather, it was an article she read in a local paper about a wig-shop owner who was donating some of her wares to needy cancer patients. Ms. Brown believed this was a cause she could get behind. She quickly learned, however, that there is more to philanthropy than simply handing over an envelope stuffed with cash.
“It was very frustrating for me in the beginning to learn how to give away money,” Ms. Brown said. “I agonized over it.”
After numerous consultations with lawyers, she concluded that setting up her own nonprofit organization was too involved for her needs. Instead, she called the Columbus Foundation, which helped her establish the Hair Theater Fund as a donor-advised fund at the community foundation. Through the fund, Ms. Brown directs money to local hospitals, which pay for the wigs chosen by chemotherapy patients.
To date, the fund has received more than $72,000 in donations — including the $6,000 raised at this most-recent dinner — from admissions, a raffle, T-shirt sales, and a $2,500 donation from the local Davis Foundation, which sponsored the show at Moretti’s.
Ms. Brown’s philanthropic wheels are still turning. She wants to start “tupperhair parties” — potluck dinners organized by circles of female friends. At evening’s end, each participant would donate what they would have paid for a haircut and color to be given to a local cancer charity.
“And they would be asked to bring a picture of a hairdo gone amiss in their life,” Ms. Brown said. “Could be your prom hair, or your wedding hair — everybody has one.”
