Friday, April 20, 2018

The Pros and Cons of Short Hair

I have had long hair my entire life. Maybe not as a baby, but I don't remember that. One of my mother's rules was that girls do not have short hair. I could cut it as short as I wanted, as long as it reached below my collar bone. At the same time, butt length was considered unacceptable. Crystal Gayle was just as extreme in my house as Twiggy.

Eventually, I got old enough to make my own decisions, as most of us do. When I was finally free, I could do whatever I wanted with my hair. I could chop it off, dye it purple, get a heavy metal perm or go full Amidala. My hair was entirely up to me.

So I kept it the way it was. I tried different styles over the years, but nothing radical. There was an unfortunate period with bangs, which is something most of us put ourselves through for whatever masochistic reason, but the length was always shoulder to waist, or somewhere in between. I never went blonde or red. Or purple.

Seven months ago, they shaved it all off. In an instant, I went from the familiar to something completely unlike anything I had ever known. I was balder than Britney. I thought almost nothing about it for the first couple of weeks. I had better things to worry about. Having your head shaved without your permission might be a first world problem, but it is a drastic change. Eventually, I noticed how alien I looked to myself. Your hairstyle really can alter your appearance. Look at Zooey Deschanel without bangs or Superman without the little curl. When you have seen yourself with silky hair below your shoulders your entire life, that chrome dome is a shock.



Practically a different man


The good news is that hair grows back. Male pattern baldness is not an issue here. The bad news is that it takes a long time. Day to day, you don't notice any change whatsoever. After three months, my scalp was completely covered, but too short to do anything. I looked like I just got out of basic training. And my hair color was lighter than usual, almost ash blonde. If I wanted to dye it its natural color, I would have to go with golden walnut or chestnut blonde. I have always thought I had brown hair. L'Oreal disagrees. The scar was still obvious, but I had already made my peace with that. If you have to have a large scar, the scalp is not the worst place to put it. Sooner or later, enough hair covers everything.

At five months, I could comb it around in one direction or another and part it slightly, but it was still far too short. I'm not a big fan of gender stereotypes. Women and men can have whatever hair length they want. It takes a lot more than hair to make someone feminine or masculine. But I looked like a boy. And you know what Bart Simpson said about blond boys.

At seven months, I finally look like a girl again, but with Audrey Hepburn's Sabrina returning from Paris hair. It looked a lot better on her. She could make anything look fashionable. I was not blessed with that superpower. On the bright side, it is finally getting darker. It's practically the color I recognize.

In China, no one really cares about your hair length. Girls in junior high routinely cut their hair short. I don't know why. Everyone I have ever asked gave me a different answer, citing tradition, safety issues, conformity and good old fashioned control over women. Some adults keep their hair short because they think it makes them look young. It does not. Put a 50-year-old in a school uniform and she will never look 15. But when you are conditioned that short hair equals school age, it's easy to see the logic.

In the United States, a lot of people would assume I'm a lesbian. Hair length has just as little to do with sexuality as it does with age, but we Americans love our baseless stereotypes. If an American woman has a buzzed head, she is either a lesbian or recovering from chemotherapy. There cannot possibly be any other reason. In China, no one ever assumes anyone is gay. It's just the opposite. I have met quite a few people who insist there are no gay people in China.

I don't know if the statistic that 10% of the population is gay is accurate or considered offensive these days, but 10% of China is 150,000,000. That would mean there are more gay people in China than the entire population of Russia. That has absolutely nothing to do with my hair, but if it's even close to true, it would be insane to assume no one around here is gay.

The best part about having very short hair is that I can wash it in a minute and it dries on its own before I know it. It's pretty amazing the first few times. Anyone with waist length hair knows that it takes a long time to wash and will not air dry anytime that day. I have not put a towel on my scalp since September. It's all very liberating, in its own meaningless way.

Similarly, I can get out of bed and my hair is ready to go. It is long enough that I can comb again, but short enough that I don't really need to. For months, there was nothing to comb. When it's that short, it looks the same no matter what you do. When it's long, you look like a crazy person if you leave it as is.




Then there is summer. It does not technically begin until June, but Hong Kong goes straight from winter to summer. I have always thought it was lucky that I was bald in winter because wearing hats in summer would have been torture. But now that it's hot again, I'm thinking it would have been better to have shorter hair in summer. Putting your hair up in oppressive humidity is nothing compared to having genuinely short hair. Whether you have a ball of hair on top of your head or down your back, it gets hot around here. Walking around with extremely short hair is like having your own personal fan everywhere you go. By the time my hair can cover the back of my neck again, the temperature will be as high as it gets.

It took a while, but I have come to accept my short hair. I really had no choice. But when it finally grows back to its normal length, I doubt I will ever cut it short again.

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Sighing Like a Furnace

Photo by HSH Management Services Ltd



My second date with Russell was a more traditional dinner at a restaurant. Maybe that sounds like a letdown after the first date, but he had a rehearsal the next day and was pretty focused on his work. I never wanted anything grand and elaborate anyway. If you try to make each date bigger than the last, you will only fail. Starting at Disneyland would not make it easier.

The good thing about not being able to taste anything is that I am now the easiest person in the world to take out for a meal. In the past, I was pretty open to most nationalities of cuisine, but I was always in the mood for one over the others. Now, my roommate loves going out to eat with me because we can always go for whatever she is in the mood.

Russell took me to Felix, a vaguely European restaurant at the top of the Peninsula Hotel. It was Sunday night, not the most crowded time to go to overpriced restaurants, but we still had to wait for a table. That gave him time to talk about his craft and gave me time to look around at what should have been an elegant atmosphere.

The dining room was large and open with sufficiently dark lighting to make it a romantic spot. The most obvious feature were the huge windows with postcard views of Victoria Harbour and Hong Kong Island. For some insane reason, there were blinds on the windows. I understand the Chinese attitude toward sunlight, but putting blinds on these windows is like wearing earplugs to the opera.

While waiting for our food, I realized that 90% of our conversations were about acting. While working at Disneyland together, we mostly talked about acting and where we would rather be performing. After he left, we mostly talked about acting, the theater and movies. Even during our date at Disneyland, surrounded my enchantment, magic and Mickey, we mostly talked about acting.

Russell was doing rehearsals for a play I had never heard of by a playwright I did not recognize. He said that the play was not up to his usual standards, but he took the part so he could work on an Italian accent. That sounded like a strange reason to accept a part to me, but Russell said that the accent was his idea. Nowhere in the play is his character described as Italian, but he felt it was necessary to play him as one. He also wanted some of the other actors to do accents, but they refused. When Russell told me that they refused because they could not do a convincing accent, I doubted how true that was. It might be just as likely that no one else thought it was a good idea.

When I asked for a preview of Russell's Italian accent, he started performing what I assumed was dialogue from the play. The dialogue was not exactly Shakespeare, but that was not Russell's fault. More painful than the dialogue was his accent. There is not an inch of Italian in my ancestry, but I have been to Italy. I like to tell myself I can spot the difference between someone who genuinely speaks English with an Italian flavor and someone embracing every cartoon stereotype. “Look-a, is-a a spicy-a meat-a ball-a” is not Italian.

Russell had nothing good to say about his fellow performers. No one was as prepared as he was, none of them did their homework, they did not understand the play, the director was doing it all wrong. I have never seen any of them, so I can't agree or disagree, but I am not interested in what is essentially office gossip. He came across as someone who considered himself too good for that production.

I have seen Russell perform. He is not John Gielgud. But no one is. The goal is to work more and more and get better all the time. Russell is young enough to improve. I just found it disappointing that he was so dismissive of his colleagues when he is only starting out himself.

In an effort to change the subject, I asked him about music. I almost asked him about books, but that could easily segue into acting, and movies were obviously dangerous ground. Music seemed safe. Everyone likes something.

“I'm only listening to soundtracks right now,” he told me. “The Godfather II soundtrack really invokes the nuances of each performance. You can hear De Niro's anguish in the Immigrant Theme.”

I asked him about his family. When you are an expat, family comes up a lot. Most of us live nowhere near the people we grew up with. Russell's family was all in Australia.

“They're completely supportive,” he told me. “They know I need to work on my craft and this is where I need to be right now. I was always going to leave Australia. I'll mostly live in London or Los Angeles as I dig deeper into what I can give back to the world.”

I thought he was joking at first, but he was deadly serious. His acting was his gift to humanity.

When the food arrived, there was not much to talk about. I could comment on how it looked, but I had no idea how it tasted. For Russell, eating at an overpriced restaurant would help him play a wealthy character some day. I was surprised that he did not pick an Italian restaurant to immerse himself in the culture.

The food was expensive, and I told Russell I would pay for myself, but he said that was out of the question. He had a plan for the night and he laid it all out on the table. Dinner at a romantic/expensive restaurant followed by a night at his place where he already set out an array of scented candles and covered his bed in rose petals. He said that I could spend the night, but warned me that he had to leave early in the morning.

I asked him if he thought that maybe he was being just a tad on the remarkably presumptuous side.

“It's our third date,” he replied. “You know what that means.”

It was actually our second date.

“Disneyland counts as two,” he decided.

Either way, I did not know what that meant. Is there some international rule no one ever told me about that everyone is required to have sex on the third date, or second if the first is at Disneyland?

“Everyone knows it,” he told me. “If you're mousy or something, I'll settle for a blowjob.”

It was April 1st, but he was not playing a prank on me.

The thing is, Russell was a decent person. When you work at Disneyland, you can participate in their Voluntears program. Disney cast members go out into the community with people who know what they are doing and take children on nature walks, visit hospitals, take poor children to the theater, go swimming with disabled children, that sort of thing. I saw Russell at some of those events. They were never a job requirement. It was all voluntary. Creepy, self-involved, prima donnas don't do that. Unless their PR managers and cameras are nearby. Russell does not have a PR team. Yet. And no reporters anywhere care what he is doing.

I knew that somewhere, maybe deep down, Russell had a good heart. But he was also a desperately horny dog. He needed to get some as quickly as possible.

I ruined his plans. Not only did I pay for my meal, but he had those rose petals all to himself. I don't think I was mean, but I let him know that there would be no third/fourth date. I pointed out that prostitution is legal in Hong Kong and bars are everywhere. If he really needed sex right away, there were plenty of options. He claimed that he wanted a relationship, but that was not the impression I got. He never asked me anything about me that did not involve acting. He knew that I was in a serious car accident and had brain surgery, but he only saw it as something I could use if I ever play an injured character someday. Everything turned back to acting, somehow. Even his scented candle plan showed that he was not thinking about me per se. Any warm body would do.

I understand dedication. When you want to do something artistic for a living, you really have to work at it. Artists don't have patrons anymore. You have to climb that mountain by yourself. But if you want other people in your life, you have to have a life. Hopefully, Russell will meet a wanton actress who likes reciting dialogue during sex.

“Leave the gun. Take the cannoli. Take the cannoli!”