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I grew up in white, upper-middle-class, suburban Kansas City, Missouri, during the '60s. In 1964 my parents took the family to the world's fair in New York City, where I experienced for the first time the dense electricity of real urbanity. I loved everything about New York: the crowds on the streets, the multiplicity of signs and architecture and styles of dress, the acrid and fishy smell of Chinatown, the Jetsons-like General Motors "Futurama" exhibit at the fair, even the spicy food (garlic!).

When the Mod Squad television series premiered in 1968, it represented that same quintessential urban coolness to me. It felt like my personal window into an adult world, where people of different classes and races worked together, and even though, as cops, the characters were "the man," they were also anti--everything establishment.

Peggy Lipton, the lead actress, wore great clothes and had straight, long blond hair. And she got to hang out on camera with sexy Michael Cole and the grooviest of all, Clarence Williams III. I wanted to be Peggy Lipton much more than the other fantasy TV version of "me," Marcia Brady from The Brady Bunch.

In reality, I was a nerd (the girls in high school nicknamed me "Miss Organization," and I don't think they were envious), so having hair that made me seem like the kind of girl one saw on television was very important to me. I discovered that my hair was the one thing that I could manipulate to make me seem at least superficially like someone I wasn't.

So in high school, to try to be "cool" -- that is, to look a little bit older, a little bit more sophisticated -- I grew my hair long and styled it just like Peggy Lipton's. I also tried somewhat successfully to make my tawny hair even blonder by spritzing it with Sun In and lemon juice as I toasted during the hot Midwestern summers. Lightening the color was my second step in changing my hair to create a new, improved version of myself to project to the world.

As a teenager my salient physical attributes were my hair and my -- "no, really, I'm not a nerd" additional bit of '70s pre-Goth rebellion -- black nails. And although mercifully I jettisoned the black nail polish in college, as an adult the long, straight hairstyle I'd so carefully adopted in high school remained a defining piece of my look, inextricably linked with my identity -- as, I think, our particular style does for nearly all of us. Subconsciously, I believe, I thought my hair possessed almost talismanic protective properties.

But even as I maintained the uniform length of my hair, I began further experimentation with its color as a tool to assert my individuality and uniqueness. And over the years, my hair has gone through many, many different hues, from what I thought of as aubergine -- but which a male lawyer friend once horrifyingly described as "deep purple" -- to various roan and chestnut shades.

My first job right out of college was as an administrative assistant at the now defunct Manufacturer's Hanover Bank, assigned to move money among the bank's clients in the Great Lakes District. Yes, it was in midtown Manhattan, but could there have been a more boring job in the world? I sat at a desk opposite the men's room in the front row of a vast airplane hangar--like open office space. (Trust me: there was nothing more mortifying for the twenty-one-year-old me than to have men by the dozen smile directly at me as they zipped their pants on leaving the bathroom.) My work consisted in its entirety of writing out paper-money wire-transfer requests for companies in Illinois and Indiana; robots could have handled the job. Row upon row of hushed, uptight people cascaded behind me in desk after desk, each row representing a notch up the hierarchy toward the glassed-in aquarium-like offices of the vice presidents. The few women who worked there in 1977 were blond and wore conservative suits and pumps. Wearing any style outside of the dull Brooks Brothers dress code was practically a fireable offense, so I dyed my hair a rich bittersweet color as a way to demonstrate to myself and to the outside world that I did not really belong in this death-before-my-time job. I thought the artificial color communicated that I was, like, you know, some kind of an artist who was working this job just to pay the rent. Which was true, minus the artist part.

I didn't stop using my hair color as a tool to differentiate myself after I quit the bank. My next job was as a secretary in the international division of Children's Television Workshop. And even though I wasn't doing anything other than taking dictation from an amped-up, full-of-himself, would-be-James-Bond British salesman, I wanted to try on a more sophisticated persona than my kind of down-market-bank-clerk reddish hue, so I colored my hair a rich walnut shade. And I actually felt different. More sophisticated. By the time I started traveling for the job, selling Sesame Street in Haiti and Brunei and Malaysia, I already felt a bit like Mata Hari (and you know what the anagram of her surname is, don't you?).

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