Changes that Matter
As a child in the early 60’s I always wore my hair in a crew-cut. I wore it that way because A) I didn’t really care what I looked like, and B) It was how my Dad wore his hair. But, even so, by the third grade, I was wearing my hair a little longer. Not, “over the ears” longer, just long enough to actually comb. I’ll never forget the last crew-cut I ever had. A girl was over at our house and she was a little flirty with me but I had to leave with my Dad to get a haircut. The hair was already a length that I could comb, but my Dad convinced me I should get it cut like his again. When I got back to the house, the girl asked me why I got my hair cut like that, and the flirting disappeared. That was my first experience with the idea that I should care a bit more about my own appearance (and that Dad may not know everything).
Fast-forward to the mid 70’s and my Dad still has a crew-cut, but I’ve been growing my hair past my ears for some time. I had to put up with complaints from my Dad like “The men in our family don’t look like women,” but I really looked pretty mainstream by then. Dad’s crew-cut was the odd-ball hair style. But, of course, there was no convincing him otherwise. That is, until he went through EST. Erhard Seminars Training (EST) was a quintessential 70’s kind of phenomenon where people paid a lot of money to learn how to become a new person. They emphasized change. They noticed right away that Dad’s hairstyle was a throwback, so they challenged him to let it grow longer. At first he disagreed with them, until he decided to count the number of crew-cuts in the first 100 people he came across, and didn’t find a single one. So, he grew his hair out, joining me as one of the “men who look like women.”
He received lots of praise by his EST buddies for his willingness to stretch himself and some of the higher-ups of the organization began to take note. When his hair was long enough, he even got a permanent, which got the EST people all in a twitter because of how far he had come. There was talk about important positions within the organization. But, at home he was still the guy who had lived with a crew-cut for decades and he started demanding that my Mom help him with his hair because “she knows how.” As he got more and more frustrated with dealing with it, he had an epiphany: If they liked it when he grew it long, and loved it when he got a perm, they were going to go nuts when he went with the Yul Brynner look. That’s right, he shaved it all off. But, here’s the thing, bald looks great, even sexy, when you have the shape for it. But Dad’s head had knobby protrusions and a couple of ugly moles and a permanent five-o’clock shadow. To look at him was like looking at someone who had just been in a terrible accident. It was horrifyingly disfiguring, but you knew it would be impolite, even depraved, to stare for any length of time.
Needless to say, the EST buddies who loved change for the sake of change didn’t like THIS particular change and he fell out of favor. I like change too, but I learned early on that not every change is a good thing. I think Dad learned that lesson too, just a few years later than me.