Some are born with big hair, some achieve big hair, others have big hair thrust upon them.

 I belonged to the last category. It happened in Houston ground zero for bouffants, bubble dos, end beehives, and the site of the 1995 Hair Ball. I'd entered myself in this local pageant, a benefit for the Lawndale Art & Performance Center, in an attempt to understand our periodic deep attachment, as a species, to beer-can size rollers and the back-comb. What was it, I wondered, about cloud-bound heaps of lacquered locks that persuaded us to toss rational thought (and pixie cuts) to the wind? It had to be more than an addiction to the sweet fumes of hair spray and 1960s nostalgia.

After all, big hair is, well, big again, appearing atop Audrey Hepburn styles on runways from Manhattan to Milan. Kenneth, Jackie Kennedy's hairdresser in the sixties, is in again. Photographers like Steven Meisel and Arthur Elgort are shooting models under clouds of sexy bedroom hair. Even AbFab's cocaine-and-Bolly-obsessed Patsy Stone sports an Ivana Trump inspired beehive that's almost as high as she usually is. It seemed like a good time to explore the phenomenon with a few experts.

Former Texas governor Ann Richards, who declared an official Texas Big Hair Day back in 1993, took a practical approach: "All I know about it is that my hairdresser says that women have big hair to balance a big behind." Plausible, yes, but wasn't there some deeper meaning?

"The quest for big hair is really the quest to become Barbie," drag queen Lady Bunny told me. As the organizer of New York's Wigstock, the drag rock event of the year, Bunny knows. Most of the time, she wears two wigs ("one for bangs, one for height") and, like Barbie's hair, they are almost always platinum blonde except when she's "being Bunny's evil cousin," during which times they are black.

The co-authors of The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, Jane and Michael Stern, plumbed the spiritual side. "There's tremendous sacrifice involved in creating and maintaining such a hairdo," explained Michael. "You're suffering a lot at the altar of hair spray and a teasing comb. Even when you sleep, you have to do so in a way that won't destroy [the style]. Like the Divine Spirit, big hair is with you always."

The last word came from Kenneth himself. "I think it makes people feel attractive," he revealed, shockingly. "People are looking in the mirror and saying, 'I look better when my hair isn't flat to my head."'

But no matter what the theory, it's hard not to hear a collective cry -Wake up and smell the Spray Net- emanating from under the bubble dryers and slow-turning ceiling fans of a thousand salons throughout Texas and the South.

The voice on the phone was twangy and sweet. Ray-chel? This is Susan Romeo from Venus Hair.... All sorts of ideas are flowing down here.... Right now we're thinking about a New York theme. Maybe a giant apple made of hair with the New York City skyline coming out of the top of it.

I'd placed my fate vis-a-vis the pageant in the bouffant-friendly hands of Susan Romeo (stylist) and Susan Venus (owner/stylist) of Houston's Venus Hair salon. In the months preceding the Hair Ball, I was to receive several bulletins on the progress of the headpieces that Venus, Romeo, and I were to wear, both from the Susans and from my friend Louy Meacham, who drove by the salon l and phoned me with updates.

Ray~hel? Hi, this is Susan Romeo here. Honey I need a measurement of your head…Well, it’s for the headpiece. It's going to be attached with a welder's hat band....

Hairy apples? Welders' hat bands? Things seemed to be spinning out of control. Ray-chel? We've finalized the design. It's going to be called Venus Power Hair.... We're not putting any five-foot-high beehive on you, but it will be big… It's about twelve times the size of a normal hairstyle.... We're carving the basic shape out of plumbing insulation—the kind you spray around the sink to keep out rodents and the like? "Houston, we have a problem" is what I would have said had I any sense at all. But instead, I took a deep breath, hung up the phone, and pondered the link between haute coiffure and pest control.

Louy's subsequent message on my machine did little to soothe my increasing sense of panic. Brace yourself, it began, I just drove by Venus and there are three huge foam superstructures drying in the sun on the sidewalk outside the shop. Oh dear. . . (beep).

Ray-chel? Hi I'm just calling to give you an update. We’re gluing the hair on yours right now. Next, we'll style it. Ours are done. We're calling mine French Twist From Hell and Venus's is Swamp Thing... What should you do with your own hair? Honey, your hair is irrelevant.

May-day! Louy again. Things have reached fever pitch down here. Are you sure about this? You may never be the same again. . . (beep).

True, but I was in too deep to turn back now. I booked a flight and headed for Texas.

To drop in on Venus Hair is to enter a world where the only thing thicker than the smell of setting lotion is the native drawl of the stylists. Venus and Romeo routinely reject any personal culpability for holes in the ozone layer, even as they "bulletproof 'a customer's hairdo with monsoons of hair spray and then dare it to move.

Their names are real, given to them by husbands who have long since moved on. Venus, whose beautiful, catlike face is dominated by laser-blue eyes, is the calmer of the two. Romeo, equally handsome, in a more Delta Burke way, is prone to turning cartwheels and flashing her "titties" in front of the judges at a local parade and answering emergency coiffing calls on roller skates, misting the air with hair spray as she speeds to the aid of the tress-distressed. Both are wizards with hair. The Heights Tower retirement home across the street sends in a steady stream of blue-haired clients past the salon's tandem bicycle—which stands, decorated with artificial grapes, dolls' heads, and plastic curlers, permanently parked outside the front door.

Inside, you might find Venus gently telling a 93-year old guest that it's "time for a little shake-and-bake" under the bubble dryer in the back. Or Romeo on the banana-yellow wall phone, taking down appointments. There will certainly be a large cat asleep on one of the red Naugahyde barber's chairs, and several customers a policeman, a candidate for a Ph.D. in anthropology, the guy who owns the deli next door—in various stages of beautification. Inevitably, there's a visitor or two parked on the sidelines—someone who's simply dropped in to say hi or deliver a lunch time gift of rice and beans or just sit a while and watch the daily show.

It's difficult, at first, to adjust to the sheer richness of the decor the innumerable mannequins dressed as bikers or brides, the colored beads, the six plastic Venus de Milo statues, the religious cards and candles, the Mardi Gras masks, the blue jukebox but eventually your gaze comes to rest on three huge hair sculptures atop three overpowered mannequins. They are the headpieces for the Hair Ball.

"What it comes down to is you've got a mechanic telling a hairdresser what to do," Johnny Griffith is saying. "That was one of the big challenges right there." With the Hair Ball just hours away, the atmosphere in the salon is frantic. This does not deter this jovial man in his neon-print shirt from explaining how he constructed the tsunami wave of ash-blonde hair that is sitting on my head, obstructing all but my forward view. Johnny is the genius car mechanic and inventor behind the welders' hats and foam insulation that make up the skeletons of the three creations.

"Venus, get out the needle-nose pliers again," Romeo says over her shoulder as she fiddles with my hairline. Movement is difficult. Romeo has on the chestnut tornado of a beehive she made for herself to wear in the pageant. It reaches two and a half feet into the air, while Venus's column of black curls—decorated with hair-flowers and marsh grass—taps in at almost a yard high. Nestled in Venus's curls are five battery operated birds that chirp every time she moves her head.

We had paraded our giant coifs down the sidewalk the day before in an attempt, as Venus put it, "to git Ray-chel her hair legs before the ball." Buses and cars came to a screeching halt as we teetered across the street. I found the seven-pound weight a strain at first, and ceiling fans posed a constant menace—as I did looking in either direction too quickly, the momentum of which led to an Exorcist-like spinning of my head. Within the hour, though, I felt like I'd been born with my two-and-a-half-foot-high Venus Power Hair.

"Venus? Where's that orange blush? Ray-chel over here hasn't realized that she's in Texas yet." Romeo, resplendent in her Hair Ball costume of fishnets and red suede thigh-high boots, was disappointed in my way with cosmetics. Twenty minutes later, my cheeks had been rouged the color of an acorn squash, my nails had been covered in red "sport cut" Lee Press Ons, and my eyelids had been soldered to a pair of fake lashes that would do Miss Piggy proud. Big hair, I was beginning to realize, demands excess from every corner of your being.

I was not the only one dressing for the ball. My friends Louy and Jean had improved their day looks with, respectively, lavender and orange wigs, each of which had been decorated with the appropriate doodads pulled down from the walls of the salon. Louy was transformed when Romeo stapled two beaded, violet flaps over her ears. And a rhinestone tiara muted the vaguely Ronald McDonald-like effect of Jean's lurid curls. The model that Johnny Griffith was entering in the pageant sat dressed in a shiny Lycra cat suit with hair like a giant overturned comma, its tail curling out in front of her. And, of course, there was French Twist From Hell and Swamp Thing.

Remembering some low underpasses we'd have to drive through on the way downtown, Romeo joked, "We're going to have to beam ourselves to the ball." I nodded vigorously, catching my hair on a light fixture. We were all a little wired.

At the Hair Ball, held in the triple-tiered lobby of a downtown skyscraper, our moment of glory was short but incredibly sweet. Sandwiched between Venus and Romeo, I descended the escalator into a throng that included women with braids twisted into working chandeliers (Chandelhair), wedding cakes of hair (Hair Comes the Bride), and massive hairpieces adorned with doll-size versions of Diana Ross and the Supremes (Supreme Hair). Men wore Mayan headdresses, sumo topknots, and rugs literally small pieces of shag carpeting attached to their heads. Venus and I waved demurely as Romeo's more extroverted posing drew cheers from the crowd.

All night long we paraded across the granite floors like queens. Rarely in my life have I felt so good—so full of pride, glamour and power. So full, in fact, that I almost didn't mind losing to four women whose heads were festooned in finger curls and Christmas lights. Finally I understood what all that rolling, wrapping, ratting, and spraying was all about. This was what Priscilla Presley, the Ronettes, and Divine knew that, until now, I had not. This was the true meaning behind the bumper-sticker slogan THE HIGHER THE HAIR, THE CLOSER TO GOD.

Back in New York, with my headpiece centrally displayed on the piano in my living room, I realized that I was becoming dangerously attached to my big hair—in ways that had nothing to do with welders' hats and insulation foam. When Venus later called to tell me that the salon needed it back, the wistfulness I felt as I packed it up The glory! The power! The sheer loft of it!—was balanced only by the thought that, should I ever need to locate those feelings again, I'd know just where to look for them: under a mirrored disco ball in a hair salon in Houston, Texas.