Hair! Hair!

To say that Hobbes the Hobo dog just got a haircut is like saying Moammar Gadhafi has had better weeks. One grooming Groupon and--voila!--Hobbes went from half blind and haggard to high and tight.

In fact, he now looks like a deer, which concerns me, considering the city recently took down a bull elk in The Knolls neighborhood.

Hobbes has had his share of close shaves--such is the burden of a hirsute beast in the Holt household, where the moneymakers aren't anxious to part with said money. Twice a year, in fact, he goes from cute to "ew!" For some reason, though, this time, he's still kind of cute. Shivery and nervous, but cute, too.

What is it about a haircut that can be so transforming? Why is it we tie up so much of our beings in what kind of hair days we're having? Or what products we're using?

As I ponder the hairstyle history of my own lifetime, a few moments stand on end as being particularly memorable. Not that that's a good thing, though. Who, after all, wants to see another guy perm or girls with hair so big it won't fit in their yearbook photos?

What's so awful about a bad haircut, though, is that there's really nowhere to hide.

I remember the first perm I got, shortly after high school. Driving home, still smelling like a chemical fart, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear-view and almost flipped my car. The person who looked back at me wasn't a teenager, but rather some perky, middle-aged mom tooling around in the family wagon between births. I was appalled.

But it wasn't the last perm I ever got.

The last perm I ever got was in 1989. I was in my second year at Pius High School, and engaged to be married. In return for watching my hairstylist's house while she was away, she gave me an after-hours perm. Downtown. In front of a big, big window.

After pulling handfuls of my hair through some sort of skull cap and applying great swaths of chemicals to it, she pardoned herself, saying she had to pick up her son.

And so I sat there, looking like Phyllis Diller on acid. In full view of anyone who happened to walk past her downtown shop that evening. I was utterly alone and a wee bit scary to look at. And she took a very, very long time to return.

By the time she returned to the shop, two thirds of my hair was officially dead, looking more like a bleached hay bale than anything that could grow out of a skull. For half a year, I lived as an albino scarecrow, with strange, white strands stapled to the sides of my head.

Mark married me anyway.

But only because he'd had his fair share of really bad cuts, too.

Like that time he got three cuts in one day from the hair college downtown. . . .