Chrome Domes

Chrome Domes

By Paul Greeley

Whoever is responsible for making the turnaround that bald is beautiful should get the Public Relations of the Year Award. I’m sure it must have been a bald guy. I suspect this must be a right wing conspiracy because let’s face it, most right wingers are bald guys.

Talk about turning a negative into a positive! I mean for years, bald guys were disparaged and looked down upon. Less hairy translated into less virile, less sexy, more old.

But now everybody’s going bald--- ball players, actors, no matter the age. The thinking seems to be better to shave it all off before it’s all gone than hang on to the what’s left. I can’t ever see a bald James Bond though.

Hair, especially long hair, used to be revered. Remember the play, Hair? “Flowing, showing, long as I can grow it, my hair”! Back in the Age of Aquarius, when I was in college, hair meant something, it identified you politically, it was a sign of where you stood, what you stood for. If you had long hair, you were into sex, drugs, and rock and roll music played real loud. If you had long hair, you probably threw a Frisbee.

If you kept your hair short, you were probably into lifting weights, NASCAR, the Vietnam War, and voted for Nixon. There were the freaks who wore their hair long and then there were the straights who cut their hair short. The line was drawn as it were, by the length of your hair. The guys with short hair resented the guys with long hair, and made cracks like, “you look like a girl” or “get a hair-cut”.  I once feel asleep in the barber’s chair only to wake up and find the bald barber had taken liberties and given me a really short hair cut. That was the last time I ever used a barber to cut my hair.

I wanted to grow my hair long like the Beatles. I yearned to be able to toss my long hair back with a jerk of my head. But I had curly hair. Instead of it growing down and long, it grew up and out. My mother’s friends would always say, “Oh Bette, I wish my hair was curly like Paul’s.” I wore hats to bed and used chemicals to try and straighten my hair. The chemicals made my hair sizzle and fry when I applied it. Afterwards, my hair had a slightly burnt smell. But it was straighter!

I admit here publicly that I have an ‘area’ in the back of my head where the hair is especially thinning and in the right light, it appears to be, how do I say it, balding. There’s hair there but not enough to cover the skin sufficiently so that you don’t see what appears to be a bald spot. Thankfully, it’s in a location where I can’t see it when I look into a mirror. When I look in the mirror, I see a nice tuft of hair there in the front and on top and plenty on the sides.  And maybe some slight comb-over towards the back.

These days, hair or lack of it doesn’t say anything about you politically. You can’t tell if the bald guy next to you is the most left-wing, tree-hugging liberal there is or if he’s just folliclely-challenged. Or maybe he just wants to shave his head. Be natural. I’m bald and I’m proud! There’s even a web site for bald guys called Bald R Us. I’m not kidding; I did the research. Their motto is ‘say no to rugs, drugs and plugs & comb-overs’.  No Rogaine sold here. No pictures of Donald Trump. They have tributes to Bald Man of the Month and Bald Man of the Year. They honor bald men like the actors Ving Rhames and Vin Diesel and other bald guys whose names begins with V. 

Who’s going to tell big, bad, bald guys like Ving Rhames or Vin Diesel that their baldness isn’t beautiful? Not me, you can tell by my hair that I’m a pacifist when it comes to violence.