Something about Parenthetical Man's Hair.....

When the house lights came up,
it was Follicles Bergere

Jamie leaves tomorrow to house and dog-sit for Peyote, his art professor Kirk's bull terrier [http://tinyurl.com/3cwh89y]. He decided to have an early dinner out with his high school friends. Which is okay. You know. I suppose the risk was I would turn dinner at home into The Last Supper. I've been going a little overboard this past week.


He says he'll be home early, and we'll watch a couple old episodes of Ab Fab; it was from Eddie I stole my best parental line: "Mummy's trying her best, darling." So I've been sitting here trying to kill time, figuring I'll deal with the big stuff--what to do about Jamie's biological father's request to meet Jamie http://tinyurl.com/4yckhbl--tomorrow.   


I started thinking about that night the Parenthetical Man [PM]  took me to see The Importance of Being Earnest, and how I've avoided thinking about our date, which was perfectly fine in all ways except for the hair thing, which killed the incipient "mood."


What happened was this: When the play ended and the theatre went from dark to "get out now" over lit, I turned  to beam my delight at PM. I saw these rows of stalks of hair, all perfectly aligned like early season corn stalks along the crest of a hill on an Amish farm.


Initially, it perplexed me greatly, and when I'm perplexed even moderately my mind free falls into peculiar associations. At that moment arose the image of the Terracotta Army: all those sculptures of soldiers excavated in China, lined up, orderly, by the thousands. 


What was with the hair thing??


Hair plugs. 


I'd never seen hair plugs--to the best of my knowledge--but, trust me, when you see Early Stage Hair Plugs, you know exactly what you're looking at. You wish you didn't, but you do.


Later, when he took me to the Campbell Apartment at Grand Central for a Prohibition Punch,  we sat on the balcony, talking about the play, laughing, making up stories about the beautiful young people on the first floor.  It was romantic. His smile made those parentheses. It was dark.  His hair looked full.


But an unwelcome thought kept making its way into my head [the persistence of unwelcome thoughts is one of the symptoms of OCD, btw]. 


I kept wondering from what part of his body they'd lifted the hair follicles. That's how it works. I know because women in my family suffer from Female Pattern Eyebrow Baldness and by 68 or so, they start using Sharpie pens to make eyebrows.  I've looked into hair transplant alternatives to Sharpies.


So I knew that there are all kinds of parts of his body from which those plugs might have been harvested. 


Then I started to notice how he would abstractedly massage his left underarm area, as if it were in some pain. 


Then arose another  image, this time of him spraying his head with Right Guard before our date. 


And even a second Prohibition Punch couldn't get me in the mood after that.