THE HAIRCUT

Today for some unknown reason, I ruminated about the question - Are kids today more concerned about how they dress, how they look then when I was a teenager?  The senior citizen in me wants to say, “Yes indeed…what’s this world coming too…girls never wore makeup until they were in high school, if then!”  But the reality is, when I think about it, nothing has changed that much except kids today use influencers on the internet as their models - we used Photoplay magazine and TV commercials between numbers on Bandstand to check if we were keeping up with the “styles”.  And to be honest, in my day when the girls in my school were accused of spending too much time on their hair - the boys did too.  And then I think about the haircut…

…Football season had finally come to an end and I could let my buzz cut (unlike today we players kept our hair short to fit inside our helmets.  Long hair was hot.  But today that doesn’t seem to matter - maybe the helmets are bigger?

I skipped a few weeks of our  bi-weekly haircut trip to the barbershop with my grandfather to let my hair get long enough to make a change.   I had to make a very important decision  - I had to pick a haircut from the big poster on the wall of Mr. Ianello’s shop. (A kid’s haircut was $1.50 and adult’s were $2.50 plus an additional 50 cents if they wanted a shaved neck and hottowel. Today I go every two months and spend $20 bucks for a five minute styling with an electric razor. Our “old country” Italian barber only used scissors and a straight razor.  His one modern device was a small machine that shot out a glob of hot shaving cream.)  I trusted the sign because in bold letters it proclaimed that the bunch of examples were the “Modern” styles.  Pop went first so instead of reading one of the 10 year old Field & Stream magazines from the table-top dog-eared library of men’s waiting room diversions, I pondered the sign imaging which style was right for me.  Ah vanity, vanity - it does view the world through foggy glasses.

I evaluated each choice.  Crew cut & butch - definitely out of the question.  All the “contoured” ones were definitely much too old looking.  The forward combed “boogie” was much like an “auto-shop” guy - I was a “college prep” major.   (Plus, it reminded me a lot of the Bandstand South Philly regulars in their pointy shoes and pegged pants.   tooFinally, I narrowed it down to a flattop or flattop boogie, the only difference was it had sideburns and longer side combacked.  The barber called, “Next” and the moment of truth had arrived.  “Waddilitbee?” Mr. I asked with his thick accent.  I asked, “Do many kids get the flattop boggie?”  “Some,” he responded.  “But I think it is not so good - a real flattop or nothing is better.”  I caved and utter”Flattop”.  And he began by skinning off all the hair on the sides of my head and then to my amazement he waxed my hair straight up and too a wide flat comb-device and put it on the top of my head and clipped the hair to a perfectly flat flattop.  “We guarantee that our flattops are perfect”, he announced.   He then said to my Grandfather, “Herb he needs this wax-stick to make his hair stand up. It ain't gonna do it on it’s own.  It’s a dollar extra but it will last for a long time.”   I said, “Pop I’ve got a buck left from my allowance.”   And he replied with a chuckle, “Keep you money, but don’t say I never gave you anything.”  (Growing up my grandfather loaned me lots of money that I never repaid - wish I could now.)  The barber then gave me a quick lesson in proper waxing and brushed my neck with his ancient badger hair brush.

And sporting my new look I left home and spent much of my evening checking in my new hairdo in every mirror.  The next day my era of waxing began.  And it was as easy as it looked nor was it as much fun as I expected - the wax melted and ran down my forehead in gym class.  By the end of the first week the wax was plastered to my scalp like a hat and even shampoos with my mom’s most expensive stuff only budged a little of it.  After a couple of weeks it started to create flakes that look like a terminal case of dandruff.  And then I got an idea - the forward combed flattop boogie wit da D.A. in the back was going to be my next coiffure experiment.  But that’s another story.