Bad hair

My wife got a bad haircut yesterday.
For the last few months, she's had a kind of bob cut - visualize, if you can, the tragic self-destructive Sophie, played by Theresa Russell, in the Bill Murray version of The Razor's Edge.
She was tired of the look and gave her hairdresser instructions that she wanted a different look. Her goal was longer hair, but somehow she and the hairdresser thought they could achieve this "longer" look by cutting hair.
Oh, really?
So he squared off the sides and poofed up the top, taking her from a low/no maintenance hairdo to one that requires blowdryer teasing on the top every morning. This, she says, will assure that she looks like crap after wearing a motorcycle helmet or anything else that will smash it down.
If I were looking for an example of the differences between men and women, I doubt I could find a better one.
Most men's attitude about hair is best summarized by the BMW motorcycle ad showing a guy with tousled, tangled hair and the caption, "I have a new hair stylist. His name's Helmet."
If you frisked every man in America, I'm willing to bet you'd find that fewer than 15% are packing a comb. Most of us just do a "finger comb," running our hand through our hair to organize it in the general direction of a part.
When is the last time you saw advertising for Brylcreem or Vitalis or any other men's hair grease? We just don't care.
Got a bad haircut? So what? It'll grow out.
The last time I paid any attention to my hair was about 10 years ago when I wondered what it would be like to have dark hair. I was prematurely gray - completely silver gray by my late 30s. I asked my hairdresser at the time if it would be a big deal to dye it. Even though my original natural hair color was brown, we decided to go for drama and we dyed it black - about the same shade of black as my Korean hairdresser's tresses. Of course, my beard got dyed too.
(Note to anyone considering this: Do not attempt a radical hair color change like this if you take yourself very seriously and don't have a good sense of humor.)
I spent the first week or so enjoying the startled look on my friends' faces. My ex dropped by during this period and burst out laughing when I opened my front door to her.
When I rode out to Oregon to visit my son that summer, I found he'd gone from natural brown to peroxide blond, so we both had a good chuckle when I pulled off my helmet in his driveway.
I kept the black hair through the summer, going back for maintenance every couple of weeks when the silver lining started to show. By autumn, I was tired of it and went through a few weeks of the skunk look until my hair was long enough to whack off all of the blackness.
Did I look younger? Yeah, I guess so. Did it improve my social life? Not particularly.
In retrospect, it was probably a hair blunder even worse than my wife's cut this week.
But I'm not about to pat her on the head and say, "There, there. It'll grow out eventually."