New Hair Cut, No Beard

At least not a full beard anymore. My hair has of late enjoyed much celebrity. When most of you met me, I had it very short. Buzzed, actually, and I wore a full beard. Then, I was in "Social Security" at Abbey Players, playing a Long Island accountant in the 1980's. No buzz back then. In fact, back then -- and y'all remember -- the hair motto was "the bigger, the better", so I let it grow and grow, and grow, and grow until it became a Mozart coiffure. Beard too. This is when my hair really won great notariety, and even applied for its own zip code. I heard that there was a petition for a court order to lower my ears, and if that failed, I would be visited at midnight by an angry, short-haired posse of conservative hair advocates (known as the "Burger King Hair Police": they want your hair their way) who would shine a light in my eyes, bind my limbs and shave off my offending locks! I had already scheduled a soiree for a dramatic reading of Alexander Pope's mock epic The Rape of the Lock. But alas, sigh. Mandate, Schmandate! My hair is my hair. It's attached to my head, after all. All the hoopla about my heaping tresses suddenly awoke a tiny bit of defiance. I hauled out my vinyl (yes, I am that old to have a vinyl copy of it) recording of "Hair". There's something devilishly fun about watching people quibble about something that's really none of their concern and which, ultimately, they have no control over: sort of like my worrying that ants might invade the picnic basket of the young couple on the other side of the park. It's their basket, their potato salad, their ants, their problem. My head, my hair, my Aussie Super Hold Gel. So, instead of cutting it all off again, I just kept it. Under control, but I kept it. And it gets wavy when it's long. Wavy and curly. But now, enough of wavy and curly. Last week, I went to my friend Blaine and told him to work his magic, take a look at my hair, and fix it the way it needs to be fixed. And he did. And I like it. There's a bit of length, but it's as easy to maintain as a buzz cut. I hate using a comb. And with this, I don't need a comb. In fact, when I had my 1980's hair back for a while, I had to search my bathroom cabinets for a comb, finally locating one in a long-forgotton men's toiletry kit I received probably sometime in the mid 1980's. The following morning, admiring my new easy-care doo, I scorned my full beard, pulled out my Wahl "Peanut" (yes, that's what it's really called) and transformed the scruffy beard into a neat goatee. So there. Like it or not, new hair cut and new goatee.