Bad Hair Sufferers

Check out my tired and defeated and washed-out look. How can someone with thick hair look this bad? Is it a reverse widow’s peak or … something like the lost art of cutting hair?

Hair stylists across the midwest have spent hours of senseless chit-chat in an effort to shanghai customers into believing they are getting a real hair cut. When in reality what customers get is too much information about the stylists’ new apartment, vacation, new beau. I’ve had my ear clipped, my hair scissored into a mullet, bangs cut into a horizontal line across my head. And the price for these fashion modifications wasn’t cheap.

Can you believe this cut cost $80? But the hair-flattening tonic was free.

In my salad days, I lived in New York and went to a Japanese artist/stylist. He spent an average of three hours on me. Look at this–a great cut that doesn’t makes my head look like a mushroom or a plant.

Alas, my daughter inherited my unfortunate luck with hair stylists. Fortunately, she has a higher forehead so even with a bad cut, it looks as though her head extends above her eyebrows. When she learned that she will never in this town get a good haircut, she and her friends wore buns and mourned the loss of pretty hair. My daughter is on the right. Note her look of shock and disbelief. It was a sad day.

“Let’s go to a big city and get a good hair cut,” I told Anna one day.

She happily agreed. We boarded the Greyhound and headed for Chicago. There we found a non-franchise salon in the basement of a hotel. The hotel had elaborate replicas of Tara’s Gone With The Wind chandeliers in the lobby. The receptionist was busy scheduling appointments. “We’ll get a good cut here,” I told my daughter.

After the wash, cut and blow dry, here she is:

I didn’t feel that she got the proper styling around her face. She wasn’t happy about having to wear a pony tail to keep her hair from falling over her eyes.

After I paid $175, for both of us, this is how I looked. Anna agreed that the cut made me look older.

You’d think that after going to Chicago once and having such bad luck that we wouldn’t try again. But we did. We found a new salon in Lincoln Park. It was rated the ‘best haircut’ by Yelp. I didn’t think to ask ‘the best haircut for who’?

I told the stylist to be creative. She told me that the latest style was the wind-blown look.

However, Anna fared even worse. Straight bangs and flat top.

At least the hair cuts were cheap.

I now have stopped going to salons. I save hundreds of dollars in travel costs, not to mention stylists’ fees and the pricey medicine for the stomachaches that follow.

Anna found a sponsor who took pity on her and sent her to Europe for a real cut. Her friends no longer mourn her bad look. In fact, she was recently awarded ’employee of the month.’

I have finally found what might be a solution to a profoundly terrible problem. Occasionally Aveda Institute in Northeast Minneapolis offers a complementary hair cut. If it isn’t a good cut, at least it’s free.