Recently, at the age of 36, I was astounded to find that I had unexpectedly turned into Mary Tyler Moore.
Yes, it's shocking; I know. Believe me, nobody could have been more surprised than myself. With the possible exceptions of Isaac Hayes and Stephen Hawking, there is nobody on the planet who looks less like Mary Tyler Moore than myself. I don't drive a VW Beetle, I don't work in a TV newsroom and not even my best friends would describe me as "perky". And yet, consider the facts:
You might recall that in the first episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show - if your memory stretches back to the early 14th Century - Mary is introduced to us as she starts a new life. She has just fled her old life, leaving a nonplused fiancee at the altar and moved to the throbbing metropolis of Minneapolis to start all over again. She unexpectedly falls into a great job, a great apartment and an interesting, but at the same time, wholesome social life.
Needless to say, hilarity ensues.
Last month, I moved to the throbbing metropolis of Manchester under eerily similar circumstances. Upon finding MYSELF a nonplused, left-behind fiancee, I unexpectedly stumbled onto a great job. After a week or so of blind and truly bizarre searching, I stumbled onto a great apartment. Thus far, my new social life has been gratifyingly interesting and distressingly wholesome.
I had always dreamed of growing up to be Spiderman. Instead, I am Mary Tyler Moore. Sigh....
Oh sure, there are a few differences:
Mary lived down the hall from a wacky, free-spirited, kinda hot single woman. I live upstairs from a family of Bosnian refugees.
Mary was always running into wacky, non-threatening, colorful characters on the street. So far, the wackiest character I've run into was the heavily tattooed bikerdude who flipped me off and tried to ram my car one day for, apparently, driving on his street. (I must have missed the sign-up sheet or something.)
And, most importantly - though it goes without saying - Mary was a woman. She didn't have to go through the epic and sometimes humbling process of finding a male support structure. Being creatures of habit, men - though we don't talk about it much - are utterly dependent on a dedicated support-team of professionals who help our lives run smoothly. Cut us off from those professionals and we are lost, adrift, detached from the tenuous threads that tether us to reality. Men like to pretend that they are independent and self-sufficient, but the truth is, most of us really need a good bartender. And, of course, a competent mechanic.
But we are lost - utterly and hopelessly lost - without a barber.
As you may or may not know, I have a tragic history when it comes to getting my hair cut. I have a gift that approaches the level of genius for finding drunk barbers. I may be overly fussy - though I don't think so - in my standards for a barbershop (see John's knack for getting drunk barbers). I'm only looking for a few key elements:
1) I want a barber - not a stylist, not a beautician, not an aesthetics consultant - a barber. A guy named Gus or Merle who will cut my hair, complain about the Red Sox and not use the word "synergy" in any context. (It is not a hard and fast rule, but it is also generally a good sign if he himself has a really bad haircut. I'm not sure why that is - it's just one of those fundamental mysteries of the universe.)
2) There should be a barber's pole in the window. Call me a traditionalist, but there you go - some formalities must be maintained.
3) He won't cut my throat with a straight-razor or remove one of my ears. I know this sounds obvious, but, as I say, I've had some VERY bad luck in the past.
When I walked into Michael's School of Hair Design I knew I was probably in trouble. I actually had a small connection to Michael's, having done a telephone interview with one of their instructors for an article I wrote about a year ago, so I thought I could use them as a starting-point in my search for a new barber. If nothing else, I figured that I could tell them what I was looking for and they could refer me to "my kind" of barber.
Unfortunately, I had failed to take into account the fact that I have no spine. Faced with a determined receptionist, I couldn't quite get up the nerve to ask for a recommendation to another shop and before I knew what was happening, I found myself being led to a chair and being introduced to my barber - Chad.
Now, at this point, in the interest of complete accuracy, I have to point out that his name wasn't really Chad. It was very much like it however - the sort of name you'd find attached to a character on Dawson Creek. And that was another problem - he didn't look like a barber. His hair was perfect - very stylish and bleached blond on top. His ears were pierced. I couldn't tell, but I suspected that he had the requisite number of Celtic tattoos on his arms. He was - not to put to fine a point on it - a prettyboy.
("You may call yourself a barber," I thought, "but you're no barber. You're a stylist!")
Any apprehensions I may have had were temporarily allayed when Chad led me to a barber's chair in the middle of the salon (yes, I have to admit, it was a salon), whisked a barber's smock over me and fastened it securely and professionally around my neck.
"So, what'll it be today?" he asked.
I was on firm ground here. As a past victim of haircuts worthy of investigations by a Truth and Reconciliation Committee, I have learned over the years EXACTLY what I should ask for. Communication, after all, is the key to avoiding misunderstandings.
"I'd like a Number Two on the sides and pretty short on top," I said.
A "Number Two" refers to the size of the guide that a barber uses on his clippers, which in turn determines how short the hair will be cut. This was, I thought, pretty straight forward. Apparently, Chad didn't agree. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him motion furtively to a woman I had assumed to be another stylist. In the mirror, I saw her walk up behind me and raise an eyebrow to Chad.
"What is a Number Two?" I heard him whisper.
Okay, maybe I AM the dumbest man to ever walk the face of the Earth, but I choose to blame it on the fact that I was tired from a very long day at work that I hadn't realized that 1) this was a School of hair design and that B) Chad was a student and this was his instructor.
I won't go into details about the next ten or fifteen hours of my life (well, it seemed that long) except to hit two pertinent details:
It was the most excruciatingly tentative haircut that I have ever received. Chad would lift - gently, oh so gently - a bit of hair with a comb and trim it with his clippers. Then he would stand back to observe what he had just done for five or ten seconds before attempting another tiny bit of hair. After half an hour or so of this, it was all I could do not to leap from my seat, shake him by the throat and scream, "JUST CUT MY STINKING HAIR, ALREADY!!!"
A week or two later, when Chad finally finished cutting my hair, he called his instructor back over to inspect his work. She thought it looked pretty good.
"What do you think?" she asked me.
I looked in the mirror and I had to admit that it was a very good haircut. I told her (and Chad) so.
That's when the other thing happened.
"Okay," the instructor said, handing Chad a whiskbroom. "Just clean him up and we can get him on his way."
Chad took the brush and flicked all the hair from my shoulders and the back of my neck. Unfortunately, I must have had a piece of fluff on my ear that he couldn't quite dislodge. It was a natural reaction I suppose, for him to blow it away with a puff of breath - that IS what we generally tend to do when we are cleaning something. I have to say though, I didn't dig it.
But, on the positive side, I was done. Chad and I made our way to the reception desk. Mentally, I cursed myself for not stopping by the bank machine on my way here. I dug into my pocket to see how much money I had brought with me.
"That will be five dollars, please," the receptionist said before I could even ask.
I stood in stunned disbelief.
"I beg your pardon?"
She laughed. "Five dollars, please," she repeated.
At that price, I felt justified in tipping Chad a buck.
So here is the dilemma I am left with in the aftermath of this, my first Manchester haircut: On the one hand, I got a really great haircut for five dollars. On the other hand, it was an excruciating experience and a guy named Chad blew in my ear. On the other hand, did I mention the part about five bucks?...
What would Damon Runyon do? What would David Niven do? What would Mary do?
After long and careful thought (which probably says something profoundly sad about my life at the moment) I've decided that the quest for a barber must continue...
