The Stupidest Thing I've Ever Done Was Dance With The Hair Devil
We've all done Stupid Things, some of us more than others. A Stupid Thing can take many forms; it can be a split-second decision in a moment of panic, like dousing an open flame with gasoline from a large metal can (done that). Or, it can be a series of decisions that go from bad to worse, like deciding to counter-balance the effects of drinking a pint of Jack Daniels by taking seven Vivarin (done that, too). It could even be a life decision, like choosing to go to law school and incur many thousands of dollars in debt, only to find that you don't want to be a lawyer (I somehow managed to avoid that).
I have many candidates for my Most Stupid Thing. But I always end up thinking about the Perm.
The Perm? Oh yeah. There was a perm. Way back when, in 1982, I was a young lad of 13. I had bad hair. I had Adam Rich from Eight Is Enough, Pete Rose hair. I did not want this hair, primarily because I believed it was a barrier to my greater acceptance within the female community at Chase Middle School. In reality, it was only one of many barriers, but I resolved to try to DO something about it. But what could I do? I was born with straight hair. You can't change that, can you?
What kind of hair did I want? My role model in this endeavor became the Andy Travis character from WKRP In Cincinnati. (Remember, this was 1982: The Age Of Feathering.) If I could get some Andy Travis hair, I suspected I would be breaking the hearts of girls who hadn't even given me a first look with my bowl cut. But how? I had tried hair spray, blow drying, curling irons...nothing worked. I was ready to make a deal with the Hair Devil.
The Hair Devil turned out to be my mother and my Aunt Jenny. Jenny, bless her heart, was in beauty school at the time. My mom just wanted me to be happy. You see where this is going. My mother and Jenny foretold of a world where I would have Andy Travis hair. My hair, they explained, needed to be chemically altered. By giving my hair a permanent, my hair would have body (whatever that was), and that would allow me to train my hair, even allow me to eventually (they used the magic word) feather it. I was so focused on the feathering, I payed no heed to the word "eventually".
"Will I have Andy Travis hair?" I asked.
"Even better," they said. "You could have Shaun Cassidy or Andy Gibb hair."
Sold. Twenty minutes later, I was under a protective plastic smock, my scalp was burning with stinky chemicals, and I was figuring out which girls I was going to call first. "Hey, Diana. Wanna come check out my hair?"
It was a long process, made longer by the giddy anticipation of a new life. Samson lost his strength when they cut his hair; who knows what kind of Uberman he would have been with a perm instead? At last, it was done, and I was able to look in the mirror. To my surprise, Andy Travis wasn't staring back at me, and Andy Gibb and Shaun Cassidy where nowhere to be found, either. Somehow, they had all been replaced by Richard Simmons.
I was aghast, literally speechless. They could tell I was distressed, but seemed largely unsympathetic. "It takes time for it to relax", they assured me.
"How much time?" I was in a panic. "Oh, a couple of weeks, maybe."
WHAT? I had to go to school in two days. This was unacceptable. We had to undo it. What? It can't be undone?
Look, I don't want to say that I was emotionally scarred by the experience of going to middle school with this perm. Sure, I get the shakes whenever I go to get my hair cut and I smell somebody getting a perm, but that happens to lots of people, right? Hey, it's not like middle school is an important time for a kid's self-image, right? I'm sure those kids were pointing and laughing at something behind me, like the wall.
Over time, the perm morphed my hair in strange ways. For about two months, I looked like the love child of Kim Jong-Il and Gilda Radner. I would have killed to be Adam Rich or Pete Rose again.
Now, here's the thing: That's not the stupid part! I had been promised a Golden Age of Hair, and I hadn't really had any way of knowing what that perm was going to do to me. It was an honest mistake, and they really did mean well. No, the stupid part was that I actually let them talk me into getting a second perm!
"You need to have a perm to relax your hair", they said. "The first perm wasn't the right kind of perm." They promised a world where my hair would be chemically altered yet again, but this time, it would not only counteract the first perm, but would give my hair the feathering action I so desperately needed. I should have seen right then and there that I was under the spell of the Hair Devil, but the pull of the Andy Travis hair was too great. I put all faith into the New Perm. Needless to say, it didn't work. And not only that, but having the two perms so close together fried my hair, and caused much of the front part of it to fall out (and then grow back straight). So now I was a combination of Gilda Radner, Leo Sayer, Pete Rose, and a chemo patient.
There are many criteria for stupidity. One is being gullible and not knowing any better. A better one is doing something that you know is dumb, and flies in the face of all your experience, to chase something that is ultimately unobtainable. The first perm was a misstep of youth, and certainly a stupid thing to do. The second perm was the Stupidest Thing I've Ever Done.
Smartest Thing I've ever done? Marry my wife, Jane. It's not even close. And never once has she suggested I get a perm.
9:51:43 AM 
|
