By Lee Dresselhaus / L’Observateur / April 7, 1999

So…..a while back I was watching one of the shows that call themselves’news magazines.’ I think it was the one with Jane Pauley and StonePhillips. I generally don’t watch this one because, while I think Jane iscute, I have a personal rule against watching anybody actually named ‘Stone’ do anything. Anything at all. But this particular one was aboutstuff that will grow your hair back if it had the lack of decency to fall out. Did anybody see that besides me? Don’t lie. Every FollicallyChallenged channel surfer out there who happened upon that article dropped their remotes like they had become radioactive and focused intensely on the story about that woman who alleged that she had developed the Miracle We Had All Been Waiting For. She said her productwould grow hair. Well, sprout is the word I believe she used. Since myhairline is retreating faster than the Iraqi Army, she got my attention, and after I wiped the ranch dip off of my remote and made sure that it still worked after it’s two foot somersault with a half-gainer directly into the dip bowl, (it would have been a 7) I watched too. And I came to a decisive,if heartbreaking, opinion.

I wouldn’t buy a sunny day from that person.

Okay…time for a little adult talk here. Ready, guys? There is no EasterBunny. There is no Santa Claus. There is no such thing as a kinder, gentlerIRS. And these hair things do not work. Oh, I know, I know. Rogaine works,right. Yeah, for some people. Partially. Or temporarily. And you have tokeep buying it every month like a hopeless junkie so that what little fuzz it does develop doesn’t become intimately acquainted with your shower drain. I get this scary mental image of balding men lurking in the shadowswith trench coats pulled tightly to their bodies, waiting for a drug store to open, making their purchases with trembling hands, then slinking away with their Rogaine fix clutched to their chests in a brown bag. I think wecan directly attribute some of the recent rise in crime to Rogaine junkies.

When will the government wake up to this threat to society? Other recent solutions include the Hair Club For Men, which really should be called the Hair Club For Men That Are So Desperate That They Will Do Anything To Protect Their Fading Vanity. I’m not gonna do that. Nobody’sweaving anything on my head. Then there’s the time dishonored toupee’, orrug. Not gonna do that either. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t shake theimage of a Three Stooges type cocktail party and my hair ending up in the punch bowl or stuck to some waiter’s cuff button or being mistaken for a tarantula after it fell from my head. And the most recent remedy is thepill that men can take that will grow hair back on your head. It works,supposedly, but it decreases your sex drive.

Boy, is somebody missing a big fat point there.

And finally…..the hair plug. Have you ever seen anybody in the initialstages of that process? They have these neat little rows of, for lack of a better word, seedlings in their scalp that look like they were planted by the U.S. Forest Service during a strip mine reforestation program. And doyou know where they get at least part of that hair? From your rear end.

There is something completely undignified about the entire process.

Well, for all of us who realized that our hair will soon go the way of the dodo bird and the carrier pigeon, I have one piece of advice: Get over it. Itwon’t come back, you’re not getting any younger, and that bad comb-over doesn’t fool anyone but you. I’ve made my peace with the entire process,mainly because I simply can’t do squat about it without losing my dignity along with my hair. I stopped trying to kid myself that my hair was justfine, thank you, when I walked outside on a rainy day and a big fat raindrop hit me directly on top of the head with a loud SPLAT, apparently without any interference from hair whatsoever. I decided then that doing shampoocommercials was not in my future. As Popeye would say, I yam what I yam.He probably said that because he was bald as an egg.

And in closing, I would like to address one other small point. I was havinglunch in a local place the other day and was casually eavesdropping on two guys sitting behind me. They were both, like me, at the beginning stages ofthe Follically Challenged and one of them was expressing his displeasure that, in this age of enlightenment and equality, it’s only men that lose their hair and, except for rare instances, not women.

To which I would like to reply in my kind, understanding way: Are you stupid? The next time you go to church and begin to pray one of those general prayers that we do when we can’t think of anything specific to be thankful for, thank the Good Lord that we only have to look at bald or balding men like me running around wishing they had hair, and not at the more pleasing half of the species doing the same. The thought of my wife being bald, orthat waitress at lunch the other day, or Cindy Crawford, is just too depressing to contemplate.

And when you think of it like that, losing my hair ain’t so bad.

Lee Dresselhaus is a regular columnist for L’Observateur

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