Decisions, decisions

I haven't decided what to do about my hair. The way I have not made a decision is as follows. in June I visited my sister in L.A. I was going to get a haircut first, but I figured I'd wait till I got back to New York. That way, my haircut would still look like a haircut by the time I got to my cousin's wedding in mid July. When I got back to New York I was only in the office for four days--maniacally putting all of my books ahead of schedule so that when I got back after the wedding everything would still be on track when I got back from the wedding. On the afternoon before I flew to Nevada I went down to 60 Centre St. with my attorney to work out my divorce settlement before a judge. As it happened, we worked everything out in the hallway and the attorneys presented the deal to the judge's clerk. While my soon-to-be-ex-wife and I sat in the courtroom waiting, we watched a truly miserable case of divorce in which the parents were fighting over custody of their children. Well, we don't have children, and on this particular day that seemed like a good choice we'd made.

I hung out with my parents' in Nevada for a few days, including a 4th of July concert in the park of the little town where they live--which was a lot like traveling back to 1956--before we began our epic car trip. If I'd got a haircut there, it would have looked like 1956, but I figured no one at the wedding would notice. My parents and I then drove to Vancouver, Canada, a leisurely trip with many stops along the way, sometimes with friends of my parents, sometimes with relatives. In fact, in the nearly two weeks we took to drive north we never stayed at a hotel till we got to Vancouver. It was important to take this car trip with my parents. They're getting older and I don't think they will take very many of these sorts of trips in the future. I hadn't done anything like this with them since high school. After about four or five days on the road Mom and Dad were saying things like "This is too much" and "This might be the last one of these that we do." It was also important to me to get away from the New York sense of time pressure. We are densely populated here in the big city, and the hubbub of creativity, stupidity, transportation, grocery shopping, etc. that surrounds us cultivates a desire for efficiency. At least it does in me, although considering how often I have stood in a queue and heard someone sigh "Today already" or some such, I suspect I'm not the only one.

I helped drive, of course, which was interesting for me because I didn't know where I was going. My parents had driven this route a couple of times. Some of that country up there is miles on a two-lane road through thick forests and it's like the same pine trees whizzing by both sides of the road that were there an hour ago. It does alter your sense of time and I suppose it's a little like taking a ship across an ocean or spaceship to the moon. Onward.

I get back to New York and immediately plunge back into my work. I should add that after spending all that time in the vast, timeless west that New York City looked completely different to me. This is my home, of course--I'm not describing an uncomfortable alienness. But New York looked different in the way that it would if, for example, all of it were dismantled and an exact copy were constructed during the two and half weeks I was away. Or if you've ever walked into a location shoot in this city and found yourself among a couple of street corners worth of extras who are acting like regular New Yorkers on a street corner.

But I didn't cut my hair. I just couldn't make up my mind not that I'd breathed the fresh air of the American Northwest and seen relatives for the first time in years and met the children and spouses of my cousins for the first time. I was in what for me was a new New York: How could I possible make a decision such as cutting my hair? I took an Improv 101 class at UCB again, and I found myself in the improverse--what else am I going to call it?--where every encounter in your real life bears an eerie resemblance to the scenes you're doing in class, like the young guy running the Lotto machine at the newsstand with his cigarette smoke clouding around him and he has a thick New York accent and he can't remember whether the Mega is tonight and he *can't believe* you only want to buy one ticket even though the odds of winning are 175,711,536 to 1 and you think "God I wish I could do that character in class." By October it was the longest I'd worn it since I held a serious job (Wall St. messenger and AT&T temp being nonserious jobs).

My hair got longer and crazier--not in an Einstein way, more of a Bozo the Clown way. In November I got a trim, just a bit. Haven't done anything since.

I'm not likely to do like Nick Ross, my former hair inspiration. One Tuesday a while back I went to Harold Night and saw that he had shaved it all off. Quite the opposite of his previous style. I'm not going to do like the fine actress [UCB Theatre, Monday, April 2, at 9:30; $5; this will be a good one!] who recently went super short/platinum/upper ear pierced--but she has an assured sense of style and have made a great choice. I don't have a sense of style, I have chosen not to decide.
My hair is now the longest I've had it since high school, approximately the last time I had gone on a car trip with my parents. When I came out of the deli at lunch today a guy on the corner announced "Afro!" to me, a hairstyle he had probably worn in the 1960s, when he was younger and had more hair. I gave him a thumbs up.