It’s been awhile since the Bald-Headed Men of America held their annual meeting in Morehead City, N.C. – but the bare facts published at the time still leave me with a certain fascination.
Being a kindred spirit, I can still visualize all those shiny domes, and the very idea of the convention calls up good-natured humor about baldness – philosophical sayings, witticisms and just plain corny jokes. Some examples:
There are three basic ways for a man to comb his hair – parted, unparted, and departed.
This quip is attributed to Utah Republican Sen. Jake Garn, himself a baldpate: The Lord had time to make only a certain number of perfect heads, so he put hair on the rest of them.
Another: If you’re bald up front, you’re a great thinker; if the baldness is at the back, you’re a great lover. And If you’re bald in both places, you just think you’re a great lover.
Thinking of the male cranial foliage was a preoccupation back in William Shakespeare’s day. The Bard had some consoling things to say about baldness in his “Comedy in Errors,” including: “What he (‘Time’) hath scanted men in hair, he hath given them in wit.”
A baldish young colleague at mine says that in the optimistic years after college days you see your thinning to-mop as a “receding hairline.” But your friends are more objective – they recognize the condition as “full retreat.”
The trend continues for many, and by the time your 30th anniversary class reunion rolls around, you and your buddies are talking about the “age of the five B’s” – baldness, bifocals, bridgework, bulges, and bunions.
From that point on, anything goes. Such as: “One thing about a bald head, it’s neat.” “I’ve simply outlived my hair.” “It’s getting so that I have to wear my sunglasses in the brightness of your bald head.”
Barber shops are a good setting for mirthful quips. When the barber asks how he wants his hair cut, my blondish and baldish friend LeRoy J. Olsen invariably answers: “Black and curly!”
Paul Strong, the barber who scrapes up my vanishing hair and tries to make it look like something, has some good answers for baldish customers who kid him about getting a trim at cut rate.
“Look,” he says, ”It’s worth full pay just to find your hair!” Or: “I should charge you double. l had good eyes until I was blinded by the glare from your head.”
Let’s conclude with a tale, claimed to be true, about a certain clergyman whose pride would not allow his being caught without his toupee in place. Only a few friends knew for sure that his hairdo was synthetic.
While the clergyman was fishing late on a Saturday afternoon, his hairpiece somehow became entangled, flipped off, and landed irretrievably in the river. His frustration was exceeded only by the surprise of his congregation then next morning!