CTRL: Salon Shaggadelic
Each month, I write a column for Transistor (http://www.transistormag.com) called CTRL+ALT+DULUTH. (Yes, it plays on the "duh-LOOT" pronunciation.) Below is the text from last week's issue:
If you ever want to do your barber or hairstylist a favor, do what I do: Show up for each appointment looking a shaggy Sasquatch.
It’s like giving a gift, really – an opportunity for him or her to effect a dramatic transformation and enjoy the concomitant satisfaction immediately and concretely.
In a way, you’re providing a little slice of reality TV (just think of all the programs serving-up 30-minute makeovers of people’s houses, wardrobes and waistlines), but in reality, of all places. And if work were more like TV – with its promises of effortless metamorphoses and breathtaking “reveals” - wouldn’t you enjoy it more?
To my stylist: "You're welcome."
Sure, the fact that my lumpy head and slack features still lurk beneath the brush may limit the final achievement, but still, pruning me down has to beat merely tidying the neckline on some standard-issue businessman cut or re-dyeing some housewife’s roots too dark – again.
Naturally, such gifts also present challenges – for the giver. During this particular stretch, in which I went three months with nary a trim, my burgeoning fuzz generated a fair amount of friction between my wife and me. (Call me naïve, but it never ceases to amaze me how fast sex can turn from carrot to stick.)
Choosing who to bestow this gift upon can also be difficult. In Duluth, you’ve generally got three choices. You can go to an overpriced salon, from which you emerge with a sharp cut but also smelling like the produce section at Whole Foods Co-Op. You can visit an old-school barber shop, where for twice the machismo and half the price of the salon you can choose between a crew cut, flat-top or clipper trim of what you’ve already got – provided it’s still recognizable. Or, you can try any number of chop-shop franchises (e.g. Great Clips), where for $10 you can step out of the chair and into a JC Penney catalogue shoot without so much as a daub of gel.
This time around, choosing the barber shop would have yielded the most radical metamorphosis, given the girth of my overgrowth. But I opted for the salon option, mostly because there’s one within a rock’s toss of my house. I guess I could have hoofed it the five extra blocks to the Skyline Barbershop, but that’s a long way to lug all of that extra hair.
Now, you may find this surprising, but fully three quarters of teh way into my haircut, I still wasn’t sensing a level of gratitude commensurate with the magnanimous nature of my gesture. In fact, even after explaining myself, I rated more of a “meh” than a “My Hero!”
This puzzled me. “Hasn’t this guy seen ‘America’s Favorite Fat Ass,’ ‘Slobs to Snobs’ or any of these other shows?” I asked myself. “Does he not see me for the Magi that I am?”
Perhaps he was grossed out by the ear hair, which I discovered was still sprouting healthily upon my return home. Say what you will about old-codger barbers and their clipper cuts, but if you’re over 30, they know your pain, and minister to bushy eyebrows and scraggly ear-wells without your having to ask.
It’s almost worth the tradeoff of walking out of there with a flat-top.
