I'll not parade you backward any further through hair's history,
but from the long hair and Afros of the 1960s down through the
powdered wigs of the founding fathers, suffice it to say that,
overall, when hair is in the news, the news is generally bad.
Which brings us to the current scandal. Not long ago, The New York
Times ran a story about the rising cost of haircuts that was
headlined, "You Paid How Much For That Haircut?"
The answer was $800.
Eight. Hundred. Dollars. For a haircut. It makes Clinton's
purported $200 seem like a coupon special.
Eight hundred dollars, and I'll bet a beard trim is extra.
When I told my wife, she asked, "What else do you get with that? A
trip to Bermuda?"
As far as I know, you don't get anything else with that. Oh, maybe
some of that fizzy water the hoity-toity salons serve their
patrons.
And what if you don't like it? What then? Shrug it off with the
words we've all had to say more times than we've cared to count:
"It will grow back"?
Or what if you do like it but it is one of those in-the-shop cuts?
You know, when you leave the haircutter feelin' all, "Check me out.
This is a good haircut." And then you shower and it boings or hangs
or does whatever your hair does that you just can't stand? What if
it does that?
Eight hundred dollars.
As
the Times writer, Alex Kuczynski pointed out, the fee "is the
equivalent of twice the annual income of the average citizen of
Bangladesh."
On the other hand, it is only about one-zillionth of the annual
income of the average celebrity in the
United States. Sure, a
number of nobodies are getting their hair done at these exclusive
joints, hoping, no doubt, that they will be mistaken for a
somebody. But the target audience for haircuts whose prices would
feed entire countries for a month is those people who try to make
sure we know them by their social conscience - there is a reason
they're called actors.