Just as it was when I attended high school, there are three high schools in Duluth. There are also high schools in the neighboring towns of Superior, Proctor, and Hermantown. Of these six high schools, my alma mater, Robert E. Denfeld High School, is the only one that had its very own hairstyle for girls.

It's not that none of the girls at the other high schools had Denfeld Hair. (Good Lord, they certainly did up in Proctor!) I'm saying that it was at Denfeld that this hairstyle was perfected. Also, the term "Denfeld Hair" was coined not by students of Denfeld, but by all the other kids in the community. Also, at the time that I attended Denfeld, nearly 98% of girls in attendence had some version of Denfeld Hair.

My introduction to Denfeld Hair began not at Denfeld, but at Morgan Park Junior High, when certain girls were secretly apprenticed by older, much-cooler girls who taught them the art. These girls immediately became, and continued to be, the most popular girls in school. The message hit hard and it hit during the most formative years of adolescence: If you are a girl and you want to be popular, then this is the hairstyle that will be required of you.

In junior high, classes began at 7:45am and most students had at least a 30-minute bus ride. If you were a girl and you wanted to be popular, you'd have to get up at at least 5am to prepare your Denfeld Hair.

My high school yearbooks show nothing of the secret rituals, but the junior high yearbooks do. There are frequent snapshots of girls posing proudly with cans of Aquanet, much as later in life they'd pose proudly with bottles of Seagram's Golden Wine Coolers. There are also photos of girls sitting on the floor next to their lockers using curling irons which had been clandestinely plugged into the school's power supply. This was a common site back then. I'm sure that these days such behavior has been outlawed.

How to describe Denfeld Hair? It was often but not always long, and certainly curly. But the essential part was the bangs -- an enormous roto-tiller of bangs complete with cantilevers and flying buttresses, somehow defying gravity and hanging above the girl's beautiful, twinkling eyes. A few girls had straightish hair on the sides and in the back, but many went even further and spread the grandeur all about the entire head. The only other place I can think of where you might find hair like this is at a beauty pageant in the state of Texas.

Some of the worst days of my secondary education occurred on humid, rainy days. Days when Mother Nature deemed that Denfeld Hair would be difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish. On these days, girls would come to school with "flat" hair. They would scream at you for the smallest indescretion. They would cry constantly. It was horrid.

There is one memory of high school I will always carry, and that is of a certain hockey game I attended in my junior year. It was Denfeld against Central. There was this girl from Central there; I remember that she was blonde and was wearing a letter jacket. One by one, we all noticed her. We'd motion to her and say, "Wow." Then, when it was established that she was white hot, we started talking about why she was white hot, because it's not like we could make out her body and it's not like she was any prettier than most girls.

It was the hair. She didn't have Denfeld Hair at all. Her hair was straight, blonde, with very little product. She certainly didn't use hairspray or a curling iron. If you were to touch this hair, it would feel soft. You could run your fingers through it without getting them all snagged up in it. And if she liked you, you could imagine that she'd actually let you touch her hair. Unlike with a Denfeld girl, touching her hair would be an act of affection. It wouldn't be a ceremony for a fat lip.

This (our adoration of this girl) was to me, one of many indications that the world I'd grown up in was changing. I've heard that Denfeld Hair hung on for many years after I graduated, but considering my memory of the incoming freshmen girls, I don't believe that it hung on for all that long.

Very rarely, I still see West Duluth women with Denfeld Hair, just as I still see guys with mullets and people wearing acid wash. But it's rare.

If you're gonna do it, you might as well go all the way. If you're gonna make yourself look like something from Falcon Crest, well, then you better well own it. Make the whole fricken metropolitan area name it after you.

I'm so proud. DHS, muthafukka. DHS.

\m/ UH!