Make Your Own Hair Phone to Contact Lady Gaga in Emergencies

Rich got me Lady Gaga tickets for graduation, and once I changed my pants and called The Lucy to reserve her presence for Fourth of July weekend, the inevitable thought came up..."holy shit, what do I WEAR?"

With the guaranteed heat of the weekend in mind, I figured the best way to go would be with exciting makeup and hair and a pretty basic outfit. I thought "man, it would be totally fucking awesome to make a hair phone like Gaga wore in the Telephone video," and fixed my mind on that. Here's how I did it.

YOU NEED:
1 phone
1 roll of packing tape
old-school Elmers glue
Xacto knife (or similar)
two or three of those clip on ponytails they sell at CVS or a wig
thread the color of the hair

PROCEED:
1. Put on Lady Gaga YouTube channel or CD/playlist.

2. Start with your phone. I used our old emergency phone downstairs because I liked the shape. I also found that older phones were more ergonomically shaped, which helps with later head-positioning; the mouthpiece is angled up slightly. Check it out - cool, right?
Unplug said phone and take the handset off the hanger. Take short pieces of packing tape and wrap them around the handset STICKY SIDE OUT. I cannot overemphasize the importance of the sticky side out part. I found it helped to rip the pieces of tape lengthwise to get it worked into smaller areas of the phone. As a slightly obsessive person, I appreciate the need to get this "perfect" but you really should keep in mind that this will not show, and you can fold over points and such of the tape.

3. Wrap the phone again, this time with the non-sticky side out. You should be taping in the opposite direction from the first round of tape. For instance, if you wrapped counter-clockwise on the handle your first time around, go clockwise this time. Give the whole thing a good squeeze to even out any bumps. You'll wind up with this.
4. Now is the somewhat delicate part: use your Xacto knife to cut along the taped phone so you can pull the phone out of its new tape shell. The tape will probably hitch up on you if you go too fast, so take your time and use lots of short, even cuts. It may not matter all that much about where you cut, but I went from the cord along the top spine of the phone, then made a second cut along the side of the listening end of the phone. Then, pull your phone out of the tape husk. Here's what it looks like. (Yes, I was watching RuPaul's Drag Race and a.) if you're not, your life is not as good as it could be, and b.) I feel like Ru would approve of this project.)
5. Carefully tape over the cut so your phone holds together. You'll now have a solid and pretty structurally strong tape phone. Feel free to pretend you're calling people.
6. This next part is not hard, but it is annoying and it's another danger zone for the perfectionists amongst us. THIS IS EXTREMELY MESSY. Take your hair bits and cut them off of their clips or wigs. Pour a ton of glue onto a plate. You are now going to drag the hair through the glue, then slop the hair onto the phone. After the first bunch of hair, take your thread and tie it around the phone. As you add hair, you should wrap the thread around it, working in the opposite direction of the hair (just like with the tape above). This will not be perfect! It will LOOK perfect in the end. I also did not worry about covering the flat surfaces of the phone - the parts you speak and listen to - because they would be along my head. The hair kind of curled under them anyway, so it had enough coverage to work. Let the whole thing dry.
To attach it to my head, my friend Juls whipped up a bunch of victory rolls on my head, sprayed the bejesus out of my hair, then pinned the phone on by the hair covering it, now stiff with glue. It didn't budge all night and would have stayed through to the next morning if needed. It looked badass!

One thing I might change would be to do another covering of tape, sticky side out again to help grab the hair (which I would then "seal" with glue to be safe). Enjoy, Little Monsters!!