RALEIGH -- When she wakes up Kojak-bald, head smoother than a honeydew melon, pate round and glowing like a harvest moon, Morgan Siem will grin into the mirror and slap her reflection a righteous high-five.
She won't need the anti-frizz spray, the volumizer, the heat protection, the hold-control or any other tubs of goop that line her bathroom vanity. She won't even plug in the hair dryer.
Because by then, she'll make Sinead O'Connor look like Rapunzel, and they'll be sweeping her thick black locks off West North Street - a gesture of fellowship to kids with cancer.
"I'll probably have a different skin color here," she said, pointing to her scalp, "because it hasn't gotten sun in 24 years."
By going shorn, Siem and office-mate Stacey Alexander hope to raise $100,000 for kids' cancer research when they brave the clippers in April at a Raleigh St. Baldrick's Day fundraiser.
They'll save a bundle on shampoo. They'll win back all the hours spent blow-drying. And they'll turn heads with their shiny, clammy domes - jabbing a finger in the eye of a half-dozen gender stereotypes. After April 7, there will be no bad-hair days.
The strongest pull comes out of sympathy for kids who lost their hair to chemotherapy, and the money they reel in from sponsors goes directly toward the race for a cure.
But there's also some girl power going on here. The men at their Raleigh advertising office, Media Two, jokingly suggested they participate along with their male colleagues. But the more Siem and Alexander thought about it, they more they wondered why not.
Plenty of women lose their hair to cancer. They don't have a choice. Why should women, in the Platonic ideal, have long wavy hair spilling over their shoulders? Why should they look like Aphrodite on a seashell, instead of, say, Demi Moore in "G.I. Jane"?
Why, among all the crazy acts committed by Britney Spears, does shaving her head rank at the top?
"You're more than just your hair," said Alexander, who confessed that hers has at times threatened to take over her identity. "You're beautiful on the inside."
Last year, 39,316 people shaved their heads in St. Baldrick's Day events nationwide - 3,922 of them women, or roughly 10 percent.
Siem said she knows 100 grand is an astronomical amount to raise, even for the whole Media Two office. So since she's asking people to give unreasonable amounts of money, she feels obligated to act unreasonably in return.
"If a company will sponsor us," she promised, "they can tattoo their logo on my scalp."
She paused a minute, adding a hedge to her pledge:
"Henna."
