First HAIRCUT!

The Bravest Man Alive gets his hair cut every six or seven weeks. When we first got married, I was a Wild Thing -- No one was gonna touch this magnificent mane, nossirree! But then, his usual barber was closed one week, and we wandered into Irina's, a salon owned by a Russian lady.
Who gave him a really great haircut.

I watched Irina cut hair for a solid six months before I let her touch mine. I'd had a really bad experience with a Brookline hair salon early in our life there, and I was sick and tired of people letting out their artistic visions on my head. (Also, I don't drink in the daytime, and the mild discussions about family and vacation spots I hold with hair stylists could barely be called gossip, so the wine-and-celebrity-trash-talk scene was unappealing.) When I finally sat down in Irina's chair, she went at my head like a contractor who's just been waiting for the final bit of paperwork. Clearly, she'd had a plan in mind for months.

The results were pleasing, and I've worn my hair on the shortish side ever since. It worked because I have (or had) very "Russian" hair, thick and wavy.

Fast forward 13 years and we're settling into our new home in Malden. Obviously, schlepping to Brookline was not feasible, so we began shopping around. Unfortunately, Malden and the surrounding towns are full of places devoted to big, puffy 'dos in unlikely colors on people who are significantly older than I am. So, I asked a church friend whose hair I admired for a referral.

Enter The Hair Cafe.

The Hair Cafe would be an impossibility in Boston. It's huge. It takes up the entire second floor of a major business block in downtown Malden. And it's staffed entirely by kindly ladies (old and young) who keep track of birthdays, decorate the place for every holiday, and serve coffee and cookies to all comers.

I wouldn't trust most of the stylists anywhere near my head (see comment about big hair and unlikely colors, above), but Debbie is different. She's not into trying to make my head into an artifact. And yesterday, yesterday, she applied scissors for the first time to my "after hair". I was getting a Kewpie-doll cowlick on top. She also gave me good advice about managing the hair while it grows out -- comb most of it straight back as I used to do, but comb the edges right around my face forward.

And, sure enough, people at church could not stop talking about my hair. It was kind of bewildering to hear about how cute and curly it was, until I got home and discovered that the hair which was wet when I left the house had formed itself into perfect Betty Boop spit curls around my cheeks and eyebrows.