The true meaning of haircuts.

2020 was a hard year for haircuts. When to get them, where to get them, whether we should get them at all? If we couldn’t put words to our feelings, our hair spoke for us. Zoom chats became not only a place to connect, but also to bear witness to the significance that grooming previously played in our lives. Heads of hair that were formerly viewed as lovely locks grew wild, styles grown out, color fading, it was hard to not see this as a reflection of our mental state. Like the immaculately landscaped yard of homeowners who've fallen on hard times; the koi pond and steppingstones are just visible if you can see through the vines and tall grass. The beauty is there. It’s just different.

Kyle with the clippers during 2020 lockdown.

For months, frustrated with the need to get his hair trimmed, tired of the attempted home hair cuts by me, and the occasional professional session, Kyle has been threatening to “buzz” his head. Whatever that means. I imagine it involves shaving cream and a razor, although Kyle tells me his plan is not that extreme. But it would mean super short hair, all one length and easy for him to maintain. Every single time he brings it up, I recoil. I know that this is not cool. His hair, his body, his choice. I know I wouldn’t want someone telling me what to do with MY hair, especially not him. I’m at the stage where I try to refrain from even a hint of a reaction to his casual yet repeated comments about buzzing his head. I am neither encouraging, nor just discouraging. I just nod. I say yes. I attempt my best Mona Lexa smile.

Now that I think about it. And I do mean right now. I realize that my reaction to haircuts goes further back than I thought; specifically 1989, Regan was out, Bush 1 was in and I had an aversion to washing my hair. It's true. And I had REALLY thick hair. This terrible combination resulted in gigantic tangles at the back of my head just under the peaceful layer of hair that made me appear like a non-feral child. My mom was exasperated trying to brush out this huge, matted mass of tangled hair week after week. It was a painful process and I’m certain there were tears. Knowing that a breaking point would soon approach, my parents told me that if I didn’t start washing my hair, making it more manageable, I would have to get a different “do” that was shorter and easier to brush. I called their bluff.

They. were. not. bluffing.

The day of reckoning arrived. To be fair, the stylist came recommended to my mother by a well-meaning friend. Her child had a great experience with this man and for reasons I don’t quite understand, my mom has always said, and repeated, that this hairdresser was supposedly good with curly hair (which I don’t have), so clearly all should have gone well. My hair is wavy-ish in jungle-level humidity, so that counts for something, I guess.

The hair cut was off to a good start. As inches fell to the floor, I could see a shorter bob emerging. I thought, I can handle this, this is okay, new day, new me. My fellow third graders will approve. I looked straight ahead into the mirror, shorter hair and bangs. I looked the same, just scaled down. Cool. cool. cool.

THEN CAME THE LAYERS. As a third grader, the concept of going beyond a straight cut was foreign to me. What was this man doing? I thought we were all done here. And like a scene out of Edward Scissorhands, with a few quick moves, his masterpiece was complete. Imagine a third grader, now swap out their head for a pineapple. Even at a young age I was aware that what was done was done. He looked at my reflection in the mirror and asked if I liked it, my mom nervously chimed in. I didn’t want to make this man feel terrible for something well intentioned that he could not fix. I stared straight ahead and held back a mounting wall of tears like no third grader has ever done. I think I managed a courtesy nod. The kind of gesture that says, I acknowledge that words have escaped your mouth in my direction; nothing more, nothing less.

Mom and bro are happy. Alexa has Pineapple haircut.

As we stepped out onto the street, my mom with her purse, me with my pineapple head, she looked over at me and asked again if I liked it. She knew. She had eyes. I could hold them back no longer and burst into tears. She then did what any reasonable parent would do at that moment and pulled the toy store card. Sure, I was upset about the short-term outlook of my non-existent social life, but I wasn’t insane. I cried all the way to the toy store, where I proceeded to pick out a Barbie, more specifically, a hairdresser barbie. I can still see her cascading curly locks. She even came with a little pink plastic curling iron.

After a painful year of having to reintroduce myself to classmates who did not recognize me and dreaming about Brady Bunch sister-esque long hair, the regrowth began, as did the regular washing. It would be years before I considered any hairstyle other than LONG.

Flash forward to 1995, Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Bill Clinton was president and I had just left my middle school, spandex pants wearing days behind me (and you thought a pineapple haircut was the hardest phase one could go through.) This was 9th grade. In my world, grunge was all the rage; think Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails and Hot Topic. I was wearing jeans and flannel shirts. My So-Called-Life felt like my life (I’m still mad at Claire Danes). And my hair was a variety of shades as a result of Sun In, Manic Panic and various Drugstore coloring products. High School had begun. Now that I had my shit together, I was ready for a boyfriend.

Halloween 95' #notawig

Evan was my first boyfriend. He was (and still is) memorably outgoing and funny. At that time, you could spot him in a crowd because he had a seriously wild head of curly hair; think the intensity of Sideshow Bob, with enviable shine, curl and bounce of Shakira on a curly hair day. It was so wild that after some time my classmates would ask me if I was dating “the guy with the wig”. It never occurred to me that people thought it wasn't his natural hair. I remember an older man approached us after school one day, took one look at Evan’s head and said “it’s not Halloween yet son”. That always stayed with me as part creepy, part hysterical. But it speaks to the phenomenon that was Evan’s hair. In my mind, it was his signature look, his calling card.

Initially I was hesitant to feel all the relationship feelings. I was in 9th grade. It was scary and I didn’t really know what it meant. But, with time, it all started to make sense, I had a boyfriend. I was #adulting. He even gave me flowers. Regrettably, my reaction was more 6th grade than adult. Seeing as it was a school day, he gave them to me at school. I was SO EMBARRASSED. I came home and told my dad how mortified I was, and I’ll never forget what he said. He told me how lucky I was to get flowers and that one day I would look back on this and WISH that someone would bring me flowers. He was right. And I have thought of this many times.

Our young relationship ended as most do. It was a weekend. We spoke on the phone. Something was off, we chatted, we broke up. I felt ill. It was my first heartbreak, and I could not imagine a world where people went through this and continued to go on living. Apparently, as I was told, I would go through this more than once??! In one lifetime???? IMPOSSIBLE. I cried in my dad’s arms for HOURS. He still talks about how awful it was as a parent, knowing it was something I had to go through and that he couldn't do anything to lessen the pain. Buying me Breakup Barbie was not going to cut it.

I was filled with dread going to school the next week. What would it be like if we saw each other? Would we say hi or ignore each other? There was no protocol, no precedent. I was flying blind. It was the worst. But I could not have predicted or anticipated what would happen next. Evan was in school that day, but his hair, was not. It wasn’t shiny head gone, but it was noticeably absent. Evan had broken up with me and his hair on the same weekend. As an adult I see now how many of us alter our hair in sync with other life changes. But in 9th grade? It felt like both the person that I knew and recognized, as well as the relationship, had evaporated. It's been 26 years. Evan still has short hair.

After the Pineapple head fiasco of 1989, I mostly stuck to home haircuts by my mom. I would stand in front of a mirror with wet hair and my mom would do her best, snipping away, trying to keep both sides even. I thought salon haircuts were for adults. This totally explains why I was so confused about how some people at school looked so damn good and I looked Amish.

Prom was the first time I realized that I might need to take things up a notch and go to a Salon for an “updo”. This was not something I could imagine doing myself. I made an appointment at a salon near my house where everyone else was going. I was assigned to a stylist named Jenn, who remarked curiously on the many colors of my hair and got to work. I didn’t know much about formal hair updos, but I figured out pretty quickly that Jenn wasn’t doing a prefab job, she had decided to go full custom. My long, thick hair was going to be a work of art. Our standard ½ hour updo session that usually involves a ponytail as a base, hairspray, a curling iron and some bobby pins, had turned into a 2 hour race to finish a masterpiece. There was no ponytail. This one-of-a-kind updo was built from scratch and tons of bobby pins. As time was running out on our session, Jenn said “Houston, we have a problem” and called all available stylists on deck. I had multiple people standing around me holding curling irons. I was like Beyoncé right before she goes on stage. I had an entourage. I have been known ever since as “Houston”.

Jenn and I having fun, mid-wedding-hair-process.

There is a certain trust that exists between long haired individuals when cutting is involved. The pineapple head in me knows that this trust can be hard to come by, so I have continued, to this day, to go to Jenn for all things hair. She has long since moved from Westchester and opened her own salon called Hair Zone in Valatie, NY, a two hour drive from where I grew up. My mom and I make a pilgrimage two or three times a year to see Jenn. Sometimes my brother stops in for a cut as well. She even followed through with our longstanding plan of doing my hair for my wedding even when it meant leaving her own salon on a Saturday. Jenn was there when I freaked out, about to march outside to “walk down the aisle” at my wedding and realized that I had forgotten to write vows. It was just the two of us in that room. “Speak from the heart” she said. This is the kind of relationship we have built. This is the trust. This is the secret life of hair.

So when Kyle puts his book down for the eleven hundredth time in the last 365 days to tell me that he wants to buzz his head, looking for my reaction, it feels loaded. I feel attached to his hair, to my hair, to the lives that go along with it. It feels like he is asking about more than just hair. But then again, maybe he just wants a change.