jimsjournal
| Hair -- 05/17/02 |
Friday Five (Yeah, this is the first time I've tried the Friday Five... but after reading Stephanie's entry, I just had to write this...)
1. What shampoo do you use?
Suave. I'm cheap. I buy it when it's on sale. Hey, shampoo is shampoo.
2. Do you use conditioner? What kind?
Same brand... Suave.
3. When was the last time you got your hair cut?
Last Saturday.
4. What styling products do you use?
None.
Okay, so when I was a teenager I used Vaseline... Yeah, that's right, Vaseline Petroleum Jelly. (And you younger folks wondered why the musical was called Grease?) Wore my hair long, combed in a D.A. in back (which stood for Duck's Ass, not District Attorney.) When I was maybe in junior high, before I picked up the Vaseline habit from my hoodlum friends, I used to use something called Vitalis... had to dig really deep to come up with that brand from 45 or so years ago... I think it used to be the top selling brand. (I overcame my greaser days and have used nothing for decades... but I sometimes snicker at Sean's L.A.Look Styling Gell.)
5. What's your worst hair-related experience?
When I was in high school, at the beginning of my senior year, probably late September or early October... college application time... I had an interview scheduled at Yale (I think I've told this story online before, quite probably somewhere in my archives, so feel free to skip the rest of this paragraph if you remember reading it) and my high school guidance counselor persuaded me that I would make a very bad impression if I went looking like a hood (but I liked looking like a hood... Did she think that look came about by accident?) and so I got my hair cut -- in a shortsided flattop crewcut -- oh, unspeakably hideous, it was freakin' ugly -- so I went to New Haven, had my interview at Yale (they said I was borderline, should really dig in academically for my senior year -- my high school grades were not good, but I had very good SAT scores and was a National Merit Scholarship winner) and saw Richard Nixon address an outdoor political rally somewhere near Yale (the 1960 presidential race) -- and spent a couple of pleasant days with my girlfriend. She had been living in Kingston during my junior year, but had moved back to Branford (just outside of New Haven) that summer and I had the thought that if would be cool if I went to Yale so I could be close to her. I may not have been as clueless as the protagonist of Outside Providence but anything I knew about college came from old movies on television... going to college was not something people did in my extremely blue collar neighborhood... heck, graduating from high school was considered an academic achievement and many of the guys I grew up with looked forward to their sixteenth birthday so they could drop out of school. Oh... yeah, hair... why was this flattop my worst hair-related experience? When I got back home I discovered they were taking senior yearbook pictures the next week. My description of the hideousness of that haircut isn't just old memories, all I have to do is look in my high school yearbook!
It's pushing nine o'clock on a Friday evening... Jennifer is asleep... I'll wake her up soon so she can get ready to go to work... Sean isn't home... a message on the white board in our kitchen said he'd gone out for pizza with friends (I didn't get home from work until nearly 7:30)... Nancy is probably just past halfway back to Rhode Island from New York about now... 8th grade class trip to New York City... I am very tired, having gotten up at 4:30 am so I could make coffee and wake her up so she could get to her school by 5:45. Also I'm kind of hungry, not having eaten since lunch... And I just realized that this is the weekend Geocities is going to be shut down so I had better stop typing and get this posted.
[No, I didn't get into Yale -- went to C.W.Post College and then switched to SUNY@New Paltz after two years.]
previous entry