Essay

America Has Wrong Hair

Anyone can have a bad hair day (except me; I buzz my head), but this is wrong hair nation—by choice. What is it with Americans and truly god-awful hairdos? It seems people go out of their way to sport ridiculously unflattering plumage atop their oft times equally ridiculous faces. This past weekend my wife and I decided to get out of New York and go to Massachusetts and check out the fall flora. Well, as it happens it was too late for that. By the second weekend of November all the golden, orange and red leaves are but a sweet chromatic memory in those parts. But it's still pretty up there around Stockbridge, so off we went.

We'd booked a suite at a very nice inn in Richmond, near Stockbridge, and set off to take in the sights of local interest. It was the first truly wintry weather of the year, but again, it wasn't New York so it looked nice. We went to the Norman Rockwell Museum, tolerated the oafish guards who talk way too loudly amongst themselves about Norman Rockwellian rural stuff (unlike their surly New York City museum guard counterparts who, if left to their own devices, won't even talk to the visitors when asked direct questions), and admired Norm's fine work. Sure the subject matter is cornball, but it's amazing how powerful his paintings are in person. You get so used to seeing thumbnail-sized reproductions from tear sheets you kind of forget what a masterly painter Rockwell was. When the Guggenheim finally condescended to host an exhibition of his work last year it was high time the high art world got off its high horse and acknowledged his contribution to America as a nation that's produced some fine artists.

Anyway.

There's not a whole lot to do once you're done at the Rockwell Museum, so we decided to check out some real wingnuts—the Shakers. I'd worry about offending them, but let's face it, those fuckers—or should I say non—fuckers-aren't too likely to go browsing the web, so the heck with them and their dwindling numbers. I objected a bit, but off we went to check out one of our nation's own splinter fundamentalist sects. The sky was gray, the air was bitter cold and freezing rain began to drizzle down. We arrived on Shaker turf and I was not excited.

It is important to note that I abhor guided tours. I like to pick my own pace, choose my own destinations, linger where I want to and speed through where I don't. This, however, being off-season, forced me to capitulate and go along. In some ways I'm glad I did, because traipsing around the Shaker Village with a tour group afforded me one of those genuine slices of America that I normally avoid like the plague.

It must be said: Americans can be a mighty ugly breed.

Real Americans, not the citified, more stylish, New York lot I usually truck around with (and don't get me wrong; I have no great love for them either), but real honest to God with a capital "G" Americans wear hideous clothes, too much makeup and their hair! My God. Someone has to let America know that the feathered back Pat Benatar/Sheena Easton thing is over. But maybe it isn't. Obviously it isn't, because whenever I venture outside my increasingly unsafe safety zone of New York City I am confronted with hairdon'ts of almost biblical magnitude. These are the plagues of the pharaoh delivered upon the unwitting noggins of "good honest just plain folks."

On this tour were two traveling companions who I dubbed, perhaps unflatteringly (or if you look at it my way, overly kind) the Pekinese and Chicken Lady. More than a wrong 'do, the Pekinese had a wrong face—it was concave. Looking at her in profile, here eyes protruded further than her nose. That's not right. Her features were pushed-in in the wrong places and stuck out where they shouldn't. And her eyes were very clear and blue—in another head they might even have been pretty—so they were exceedingly pronounced against the ruddy canvas that was the rest of her face. She had big, high cheeks and a pointy, but weak chin, all framed by blonde, Pekinese-style locks. Her hair could easily have doubled for long, drooping ears.

My wife, spotting this rare specimen, came over to me and said, "That woman..."

"I know."

"But have you ever...?"

"Yes."

"But is she...?"

"I don't think so."

"Then what's her...?"

"I don't know."

But the thing is, she was perfectly self-possessed. She did nothing odd or indecorous for the whole tour. Her companion, however, the Chicken Lady, was another matter. In the communal Shaker kitchen, before the seemingly semi-retarded tour guide began to blather by rote in her nasal New England monotone about the Shakers being synonymous with quality workmanship and products, the Chicken Lady roved about the workspace placing a small, brown plush chicken doll next to various Shaker artifacts. She would then take out her point-and-shoot camera and snap a shot of the "posed" stuffed animal. This was her special travel totem. Cute! Obviously this plush chicken made these snapshots resonate for her. This put her stamp of veracity on the experience. Not only had she been to whatever place she was documenting, so too, had plush chicken. The most frightening part was that this woman—who had to be in her mid-forties—resembled her model so much. She had shortish dirty blonde hair feathered back in the aforementioned Pat Benatar/Sheena Easton mode, a small, beaky nose and the paltry chin of poultry. Weak chins and inbreeding seem to go hand in hand—not that I'm accusing her parents of having been kin. Maybe they were just plain ol' chicken-fuckers and she was the living testimony of their unnatural trysting.

To compete with Chicken Lady and the Pekinese, was Poodle-head. This was a prematurely old-looking lady with a fluffy poof of grown-out poodle perm on top (blonde, of course) with short, straight sides and back. Her husband, a portly gent with a ludicrously small cowboy hat, seemed oblivious to the fact that his wife had the unlined, but nonetheless wizened visage of the archetypal spinster lady of yore. The thing that clashed was her wardrobe, which was inharmoniously contemporary. She wore a black pleather duster, blue jeans and athletic shoes. She was probably no more than forty-five, but her ears were large and low on her skull, the lobes parallel with her jaw line, her chin—again—was very weak. She looked like one of those kids with progeria, that aging disease that makes tots look like Sid Dithers, only worse. These are the poor souls who crapped out at the good looks table.

And their hair. Their hair...