HAIR THERE AND EVERYWHERE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (3-14-24)

 
     Nothing says more about your personal style than your hair. I firmly believe that you can track the entire thread of your life by mapping the different stages your hair has gone through. It's like cutting a tree open and counting the rings, only less messy but perhaps more painful. Now that the '80s are long over maybe you wish you had tried the tree method rather than allow yourself to be photographed and run the risk that Facebook Memories may someday be invented.

     My hair has been through many trials and tribulations, and I wish I had been more sensitive to what it was going through. I was bald at a very early age. It made my head look too large for my body, and my self-esteem took a beating. I tried a comb-over for a while, but I didn't even have enough hair for that. I considered plugs, but I was afraid of electrocuting myself. It wasn't until later that I found out that MOST babies are bald. My hair grew in and I felt much better. Then my teeth started falling out, but that's a story for another time. (I did get money for them under my pillow, so I tried acquire more teeth from alternate sources, and put the money into a no-load, tax-deferred vehicle, and I wish I could remember where I parked it.)

     What was your best hair? If you're a woman I don't even have to look at you to know. My theory is that 85 percent of all women look best with shoulder-length hair. Seven percent might look good with long hair, but that's usually because they ALWAYS had long hair, and it's hard to picture them any other way. About 5 percent of girls look good with short hair but would look even better with longer hair. About 3 percent can pull off the bald look, but those are usually model types who could eat you for dinner, so you generally want to pretend you didn't notice they were bald. Another 2 percent are not good with fractions. A girl once told me she used to have long hair all the way down her back, but it's unusual for girls to have such a hairy back.

     If you survived the '80s I bet you teased your hair, possibly in order to save everyone else the trouble. Maybe you lightened it. Maybe you darkened it. Maybe you straightened it, maybe you curled it, maybe you used something called a crimper. But I doubt you just left it alone. I knew a girl who I guess wante

     When I was a kid my Dad used to cut my hair, and he was spectacularly bad at it. He took a little of the top, a little off the sides and then cut my bangs at a 45-degree angle, so I would have had to walk around with my head tilted sideways for it to be straight. He did it for free, so I couldn't even ask for my money back. I later found a book on his bookshelf detailing how you could cut a kid's hair EXACTLY that way, and I realized that that is why children run with scissors.

     These days I only get my hair cut a couple times a year, mostly because I'm too cheap to do it more often. A haircut and a shave isn't two bits anymore, you know. If you're too young to remember, two bits is a quarter, which doesn't seem weird until you consider that one bit must be 12 and a half cents. Anyway, after the haircut, J.D. sometimes asks me if I want product in my hair, but he won't say which product. In case it might cost more I tell him just to use by-products instead.

     It seems like the older you get, the more innovative hair becomes. No longer content with sprouting from your head, it seeks alternate, more adventurous avenues of germination. Your nose, your ears, your neck and other, odder frontiers, places where no human has yet planted the flag of sovereignty. My wife even found a little stray hair sprouting from her chin and claimed that it was mine.

     You always want the hair you don't have. I never liked my super-straight hair, but when I got older it gradually became curly. When I realized it was curly because it went gray, I didn't like that either. I had salt-and-pepper hair, but my cardiologist didn't like THAT. So, even if you're not thrilled with your hair, don't do anything drastic or weird that will make your husband say HOW could you do this to ME? The grass is always greener on the other side, but that's not a good reason to for your hair to be.