Big Hairy Deal

Different men react to losing their hair differently. Some of us panic, and will do anything, go anywhere, work any magic spell or spend any amount of money to keep from losing their hair or regain hair they've lost. Those are the people that join the "Hair Club for Men".

For some men, hair doesn't matter. Some of us even look better without it. I'm willing to bet the mushroom cap look didn't hurt Telly Savalas or Moby with the ladies. It wasn't half bad on Bruce Willis. Heck, it would probably improve the sex lives of half the guys out there, if I'm any judge of how guys usually do their hair when they have it.

I was usually pretty ambivalent about my hair, at least since the 80s croaked and left me with a gigantic mop of hairspray-encrusted stuff on my head. Since it became uncool to have hair bigger than the woman you're dating (and probably bigger than her rottweiler as well), I've sort of shrugged my shoulders and got it cut whenever I couldn't stand the nagging from my significant other/mom. When I got it cut, I really got it hacked, because I didn't want to mess with it any more than I had to.

But that was before I noticed that there was more hair in my drain every morning than on my dog's brush, and I wondered if I might have accidentally gotten radiation poisoning or something. It was unnerving...and it got worse. My hairline receded until I wondered if perhaps I would end up with something that looked more like a bonnet.

The other irritating thing is that while some of the hair that I took for granted all my life was gradually going AWOL, there were new recruits coming from the oddest places. The edges of my ears. The tip of my nose. My nostrils and ears started to look like some strange kind of grass bouquets. And don't get me started on my back. Caveman city.

But the thing that really got me thinking was when I went into one of those dressing rooms in the store where there are lots of mirrors. You know, the ones where you can be like the whole Rockette dance group and do high kicks, and watch the whole line of you into forever doing it?

Okay, I don't really do high kicks in the dressing room at the local clothing store. I'd probably need an ambulance if I tried. But I did get a room where there were angled mirrors at the tops of the walls, and through the strange multi-bank shot view noticed that while my head still looked like a forest (despite the deforestation some rogue farmers had visited on the edges, especially on the side of the face, and the extra brush that seems to want to grow on the opposite side on the neck), there was an area spang in the middle of that forest that looked like the trees there might be coming down with some sort of disease. Maybe they were elms. Anyway, age was visibly catching up with me.

Enter Rogaine®. I took the plunge. I discovered it wasn't nearly as expensive as I had thought, so I went for a few months of the foam to try it out.

Next column: be careful with that Rogaine...