Bad Hair Day

 

I took a shower late Thursday night and went to bed with my hair still damp.  It should come as no surprise that I awoke with a serious case of bed head Friday morning – hair going every which way.

That got me thinking about all the stuff I’ve used to control my hair over the years.  Without thinking too hard, I can come up with:

• Brylcreem
• Baby Oil
• Butch Hair Wax
• Various brands of Mousse and/or Gel
• Lucky Tiger Brand’s  3 Roses Tonic
• Aqua Net hair spray
• Vitalis
• Wildroot Cream-Oil
• Water
• Whatever else was around

Sometimes I wear my hair shorter or longer, but with only a couple of exceptions, I have always worn my hair in the same way my mother combed it when I was a toddler.  It was over my ears in the 80s, and almost nonexistent when I was in the Army, but I have always parted it on the left and combed around the cowlick on the right side at the back of my head.  The only serious deviation was a short-lived attempt to wear a flat top when I was in junior high school, and that was a total failure – my hair was too limp to stand up even with a ton of wax.

I never actually bought 3 Roses hair tonic, but my barber loved the stuff.  About the only positive was that it was so cloyingly sweet that it guaranteed that I would wash my hair as soon as I could get home from the barber shop. 

My mousse/gel phase corresponded to the years that I was driving around in an open-top MG Midget roadster.  Not only did my hair stay combed, that stuff was better than a hard hat.  You could have dropped an I-beam on me and my hair would have stopped it before it reached my skull.

For the last twenty years or so, I have only used a little water or nothing at all.  I’ve finally reached the point where I have my hair trained – or it has trained me.