Santa in the summer

In retrospect, why hair, why did hair become the flag of the hippies? Well one, it was shocking, it’s hard to imagine now, but at the time it was. Remember the first time you saw Tiny Tim? And it was kind of a commitment. It wasn’t like an earring or bellbottom pants which you could wear or not wear, you had it all the time. Again, you couldn’t get a straight job. But hippie chicks could. All they had to do was put on their straight clothes and they could get a job at the bank and bring home the bacon. That was sweet. Until they discovered liberation.

I remember at the height of the sixties our college town, Urbana IL, got home rule and one of the things we wanted to do was pass some law that would make discrimination because of hair length illegal. I was all for it at the time, but anymore it all sounds stupid.

So many things about the sixties seem so stupid anymore, mostly like the clothes, and some of the language. I remember at the time some people thought that we resembled the roaring twenties with their flappers and bees knees and speakeasies and bathtub gin, and I was all like we are nothing like them, but anymore I think we weren’t that different.

And you know fifties had their look, and the seventies had disco, but I ask you, what has happened since then? The eighties, the nineties, the aughts, the teens, just a bunch of life goes on as always.

The beard was a little different. It wasn’t nearly as shocking to have a beard in the fifties as it would have been to have long hair. But as long as you had long hair you might as well have a beard. There were some guys who had long hair but still shaved their beards, and I always wondered what was with those guys.

I’ve never understood what it was with shaving, especially way back when it started, with the Greeks when razors must have been pretty primitive. The answer I most often get is because they wanted to look younger, and I have to wonder what did they want to look younger for? I don’t think women had much choice in who they married back then, so why bother? But then I expect there was a lot of cheating going on, so maybe it had something to do with that.

And then the question I posed to the Supercuts woman when I was in for my biannual shearing. How come our head hair just keeps growing and growing while out eyebrows, pits, genital, hair all stop at a certain point? What evolutionary advantage does this give us? She didn’t know either.

I don’t understand the bum look either. You must have to trim those things pretty often, and isn’t the whole point of not shaving, not shaving?

I heartily approve of taking the razor to everything four or five times a year, but doing it twice a year, is even less bother. Used to be I would trim my beard a few times between shearings, but I always did a pretty crappy job of it, so last July I figured let’s just not trim it and see what happens.

What happened was that come Christmas time was that I looked like Santa Claus. It was great. Kids loved me. Come summer I will see what it’s like to look like Santa in the summer.