We’re all a little shaggy and fidgety a month into Isolation 2020, a period of great complication even before the hair atop our heads became an unruly mop and left us with the esteemed look of “I Just Don’t Care, Man.”
Have you studied your reflection in the mirror lately?
You know what? Don’t.
We need haircuts … most of us, anyway. My goodness, does America ever need haircuts.
Trying to gauge the public’s angst, I called my barber, Liz Angell, and we ended up in the usual wide-ranging chat about life. The only difference was that I was in the driver’s seat of my car instead of her chair at Patsy’s Barber Shoppe in Glastonbury, she was home in quarantine and my hair was getting longer and looking worse throughout the course of our conversation.
Angell has been getting about 10 texts and phone calls every day from desperate clients, many of them willing to ignore a social distancing mandate and hoping she’d do the same. She hasn’t. She won’t. And the lunacy she spoke of made me shake my head — overgrown hair just about flopping over my face, of course.
Yes, people are freaking out. One client asked Angell if she would come to his workplace and cut his hair in the bathroom.
“Another guy texted me, ‘I’ve got gloves. I’ve got a mask. I’m healthy. You could come cut my hair in my garage,’” she said. “Then I have other people, ‘When do you think you’re going to be able to work? I’m healthy.’ One guy said, ‘I’ll give you 100 bucks.’ “
That’s a heck of a tip. A standard haircut at Patsy’s is listed at $22.
“But is 100 bucks worth it?” Angell said. “No. I’ve been in the house since March 14, the last day I worked, and I haven’t gone anywhere. So why would I be that diligent, staying home and being healthy, and (risk it) for 100 bucks? It doesn’t mean that much to me. It really doesn’t.”
It shouldn’t mean that much to any of us. Besides, any barber circumventing an executive no-work order would risk revocation of a license required to work in the state. So, as much as I relate to the desperation with every whisker and hair of my being, it is time to embrace looking ridiculous.
We can trust our significant others to give it a whirl, fingers crossed, a potential contingency catastrophe. We can let it grow until we look like bears coming out of hibernation. We can even try cutting it ourselves with guidance offered (for $18) by www.youprobablyneedahaircut.com, a real test of dexterity and following direction.
None of the above seem like great options.
This is the Era of Unkempt, Spring 2020, and the pictures are not going to be pretty.
“You’ll be fine,” Angell joked. “Just use more product.”
“Liz Scissors,” as I have her affectionately saved in my phone, has been cutting my hair for 15 years. Her shop is near my old home in Glastonbury and, coincidentally, she lives just down the street from my current home in Windsor. I walk past her house several times a week and, yeah, a part of me wants to bang on the windows in a crazed cry for help.
Not that she’d recognize me. My last haircut was Feb. 19 and I’ve since grown a beard.
Everything we’ve been forced to confront and endure in recent weeks, from fear of a deadly virus to a ridiculous shortage in toilet paper, and now we don’t even look the same — all the overgrown messes, exposed roots and wayward locks, a society’s makeover gone wrong.
“When we go back to work, people are going to look like zombies,” Angell said. “It’s going to look like the ‘70s.”
It’s starting to already. We all look a little disheveled and sloppy. It’s not our fault, though. The further we push into this life of limitations, the more we realize how much we miss what was once routine and essential to one’s sense of self-care. Barbers are an indispensable part of one’s ability to feel good and put together.
That barber chair is such a safe zone, even with the razors and scissors at play. It’s almost therapeutic, isn’t it? Angell knows just about everything about me, the dates I’ve been on and every relationship I’ve been in since 2005, what I do for work and for fun, what trips I have taken or have planned. We talk about restaurants, exercise routines, cooking, friends and family and more.
I didn’t get a haircut this week — but at least I chatted with my barber.
Angell serves about 25 people on a busy day, loves her job, has a great rapport with clients and has become increasingly popular in 17 years at Patsy’s, previously known as Towne Barber Shop. Good luck sitting in her chair without texting or calling ahead of time.
She does a hell of a job. That’s her handiwork in the headshot that appears with each of my columns.
“What’s new?” I say every time I sit in her chair.
“Same old shtuff,” she always replies.
But it’s not the same old shtuff these days. Angell is among the millions left temporarily jobless by the coronavirus pandemic and won’t return to work until May 20, at the earliest. Her husband, Mark Ruppert, owns a landscaping company and continues to work, easing the burden.
“But it’s a hardship,” Angell said. “I don’t have savings. I don’t have something where we can say, ‘We can dip into something to help us over this hump.’ We were never set up like that. Having six kids between the two of us, we just weren’t able to do that to this point. Everyone I talk to seems to have that little bit of savings and they’re like, ‘I’d hate to dip into it.’ Well if you have to dip into it, this would be the time to do it. It’s an emergency.”
See? Good advice.
Here’s some more: as much as we all want a haircut, as much as we need everyone to get back to work, stop begging your barber to make an exception at a time when we all just need to stay home, stay safe and stay ugly for the good of humanity.
The barbershop poles will spin again.
Soon, I hope.
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