Published Wednesday, September 15, 2010 4:51 PM
Updated Wednesday, September 15, 2010 4:51 PM
I don’t know what it is about our hair – or lack thereof – that makes us completely lose our minds. Whether we’re talking bad rugs, comb-overs, absurd hats, or over-abundant facial topiary, we go to great lengths to deal with this particular aspect of our appearance.
Julius Caesar was the absolute ruler of the free world, but a good argument could be made that he was assassinated because of a poorly contrived toupee made of laurel leaves, and even then, nobody would trust a guy in a bad rug.
There’s an old saw that states a woman will never truly be the equal of a man until she can walk down the beach with a prodigious beer gut hanging over a zebra striped banana hammock with three long hairs swirled across the top of her head and still think she’s hot.
This is sort of true, in that the guy is far less worried about six pack abs – after all, he can suck in his 12-pack ab and almost get the same result – but that same guy has to believe the hair is okay.
Family apocrypha tells of a rather vain, wealthy, and extremely frugal Victorian forbear in my family. Apparently, Great Uncle Josephus Bombast operated under the illusion that he could create a temporary facelift by scotch taping his dewlaps behind his ears. The tape, he figured, was transparent and no one would notice it in the dim light. But he also sported a full head of hair, which undoubtedly bolstered his belief that the tape would add to the illusion of robust youth.?A few generations later, I think back to my callow entry into the overblown, melodramatic, incredibly self-important teenage years and still cringe, because back then it really was about the hair.
All my life I disliked the barbershop. I didn’t like getting haircuts. I still don’t, really.
Maybe it was the army base experience of early childhood, where all kids -- indeed, any person not in uniform -- was universally addressed as “Dependent.”
“Siddown, shaddup and be still, Dependent,” the barber might say as he cranked up the shears, a Lucky Strike perpetually dangling from his lower lip. Twenty seconds and fifty cents later, I would be sporting a look usually associated with new military recruits and radiation victims.
After years of experimentation, my dad finally allowed my brother, 10 years older than me, to choose his own barber -- but he had to get a haircut every week and pay for it himself. As my brother is famous for his ability to squeeze a dollar so tightly that George Washington chokes and spits his wooden teeth across the room, it wasn’t long before he found a place in his price range, a barbershop owned and operated by a gentleman affectionately known as “Jack the Drunken Barber.”
Since Jack’s nickname manifested – often painfully -- in his work, it’s a miracle my brother never picked up the nickname “Spock.”
Still, times do change and by the time I got to high school, the rules on hair care around our house had loosened somewhat. This was the late ‘70s/early 80s, the epoch of big, blow-dried hairstyles. Still, once a paratrooper always a paratrooper, and Dad never saw the need for anything other than a $2 high and tight once a week whether you needed it or not.
The thought that a person of the male persuasion would actually choose to pay eight dollars – eight dollars! – for some gum-smacking, Farrah-sporting bimbo to wash his hair, dry it, cut it a strand at a time, and even apply hair spray -- was like explaining Copernican astronomy to the Medieval Vatican, only more futile.
While he never really said it, I’m sure Dad’s feelings about hair care could be summed up with the following missive: “There’s only two kinds of men who get their hair cut at a salon, and that’s (insert belittling gender identification insult du jour here) and movie stars -- and I haven’t seen any of your movies lately.”
Interestingly enough, once I started working and making my own money, I found myself agreeing with Dad on a lot of stuff – even haircuts. I still don’t like to get them and put them off as long as I can, but it’s funny how a job and a haircut do, in fact, go hand in hand.