Subject: [vallist] The haircurse (#9)
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 00:10:43 -0700
From: Michele Vallisneri 
To: vallist@egroups.com

Dear Friends,

it seems like years since I last posted to this column! Let me do it
know now without much of an introduction. I'll let you know soon about
the state of all things in my life. But first, I have got one little
tale for you.

Cheers,

Michele

--> The haircurse

Just where do all these Americans go to get decent haircuts? For me this
seems a truly impossible feat down here in the Southland. You must know
that just fresh off the boat, two years ago, I determined that I would
try all the nearby shops until I found one that I deemed acceptable.
Easier said than done!

My first experience was in the back-office of an apparently respectable
women's hair-dresser. The barber proper, however, looked like an orc,
talked like a orc (well, a Mexican one), and saw it fit to operate while
watching his favorite soap opera, in a dark den carpeted with the dark
hair shed by innumerable previous clients. All in all, the experience
was frightening, but the resulting haircut was not too offensive,
especially after a generous sprinkling of hair-spray and some natural
regrowth.

Experiment number two was chez "Nippers", the domain of a hair-stylist-
turned-golfer whose scissors and lotions were slowly but steadily
yielding their shelf space to the heaps of trophies and celebratory
snapshots ("yeah, that is me and George Bush playing at the NRA 1995
benefit...") Mr. Nipper could not stop talking; the improvements in his
putting skills had obviously done a great deal for his self-esteem, so
he charged me an exorbitant amount and sent me off looking like a
yorkshire terrier.

Once this was past, I started telling people that my barber had died and
that I could not find it in my heart to replace him. I developed a
devious way of looking at people from the underside of my hair, and I
missed all the head-balls on the soccer field; but I was otherwise
happy. When Elisa came to visit me, she thought I was a bad allucination
induced by the 12-hour airplane trip.

Since then, I have tried to make the most of my trips to Italy,
committing myself to the care of my trusted Italian barber, and always
pleading for a short cut, one that would last until Christmas (or
Easter)! But just this morning I fell into the old trap, once again.

I had just walked out of my dentist's, with the cheerful and whistling
disposition of a fellow who's just left the dark corridors of pain and
torture, and carries a renewed faith in the goodness and beauty of all
things. The cruel hand of destiny laid my path by one of those old-
fashioned, cute barbershops, signaled by those peculiar "infinite
cylinders", whose diagonal red and blue stripes move and rotate upwards,
forever. (Have you ever seen these gadgets?)

Anyway, I made my cheerful entrance, I cheerfully ignored the ancient
and dusty furniture, and I sat in the chair. I was faced by a seriously
hirsute American barber, more ancient than the furniture, who proceeded
to inquire how I would like my hair. "Well, medium short," I suggested,
"but leave some length here in front, so it will be easier to comb".
"Ah," he lit up, "just like the guy who just left!"

The guy who had just left had done so looking like a perfect moron: the
front margin of his black, straight hair formed a straight line
precisely in the middle of his forehead. Sorry about the extremely low
cultural reference here, but think of Jim Carrey's haircut in "Dumb and
Dumber", and you will get the idea. I was less cheerful already. "No," I
said, "you see, I like to divide my hair on the left, here, so it should
be shorter everywhere, except here." "Ah," the barber beamed. "Like
number 40!"

Number 40 was the sad subject of a discolored, bluish picture on the
wall, one among many, straight out of a popular magazine from the
fifties. Number 40 looked like a private on his way to the training
camp; he looked like a child of the studious type who'd been dressed
with itchy clothes and deprived of his thick glasses; he looked like an
overgrown orphanage kid, and not the brightest of the litter.

"Well," I surrendered, "then just do what you have to". I came home as a
perfect anachronism, a time traveler out of his wormhole, and I felt a
strange urge to take part in a swing class and to vote republican.

Oh well, nothing that my nail clippers, together with a copious Rogaine
treatment, cannot fix.