'Mohawks for Mom' stirring up Clearview High

Chris and Seth Bingham say they aren't mohawk kinds of guys. They play in the Clearview High School band and otherwise occupy themselves at church youth group activities.

But all this year, Seth's foot-high indigo mohawk and Chris' slightly shorter orange one have been the talk of the Mullica Hill school.

The hairdos came about not out of rebellion, but sympathy. The boys' mother, Jane, suffers from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a slow-moving form of cancer. Her loss of hair from chemotherapy over the summer really bothered the boys' sister, Belle, then 9.

"We decided we would get our heads shaved in sympathy with Mom," said Seth, 16, a sophomore.

Jeanette Bingham, the boys' aunt and a hairdresser, came by their Sewell home to shave their heads, as well as that of Jane's friend Tammy Galatti. When she was working on Seth, she kiddingly swept his long hair up into a mohawk.

"She was going to continue shaving, but we yelled, 'Mohawks for Mom!' " said Chris, 17, a junior. "Everybody laughed, but we decided mohawks were the way to go. People would stare at us rather than looking at Mom."

They decided to accent their look with black T-shirts imprinted with "Mohawks for Mom" in white with a green ribbon on the back - green representing Jane's type of cancer.

They also started searching for cancer charities.

A friend, Nick Giordano, a 16-year-old Clearview sophomore, got together a team for Relay for Life, an annual overnight walk-around-the-track cancer-awareness event at Clearview, and the boys and their friends are pointing toward that in June.

Meanwhile, mohawks are sprouting up in the Clearview halls. Giordano got his own mohawk in November, and two other friends, sophomore Sam Peterson, 15, and freshman Zack Doty, 15, got theirs recently.

"It's just a good thing," Nick said. "Everyone knows why we are doing it, and while we might get stares, it is usually people approving."

Principal Keith Brook said he didn't know what to make of the Bingham boys when they walked into school in September with their new look, but he was willing to wait and see.

"The boys are just unassuming young men, so I wondered what was going on," Brook said. "When I found out, we decided to do as much as we could to tell people."

Meanwhile, Jane Bingham, 41, a photographer, and Rebecca Sypin, a California woman she met through an advice website 10 years ago when they were both pregnant, found they had another connection. Sypin's daughter has leukemia and also has lost her hair. The two women found out Mattel had made a special bald Barbie doll for a Massachusetts girl who had lost her hair through chemotherapy.

They made an attempt to contact Mattel in hopes of persuading the company to mass-produce a cancer-awareness bald Barbie and started a Facebook page toward that effort. That got some media attention. Initially, Jane Bingham said, it seemed Mattel's answer was a perfunctory, "We don't do that sort of thing."

But last week, Mattel officials called and flew Jane Bingham out to the company's California headquarters.

"I can't tell you what will happen yet, but they were certainly receptive to something," said Jane, who covers her head with a kerchief. She is not undergoing chemotherapy now.

The boys have started a Mohawks for Mom website (www.mohawks4mom.com) and a Facebook page.

They said kids from Oregon and even Europe had said they would wear mohawks in sympathy and had asked for T-shirts. The boys and their friends plan to sell them for $15, with the proceeds going to the Relay for Life program, sponsored by the American Cancer Society.

"They do look funny, but we are all getting used to it," Jane Bingham said. "It shows you can have fun and do good, too."