now that you mention it

Tonight I was talking to this bartender, and the subject of hair came up, as it does. 

Actually, there were several hair interludes that made this a very appropriate conversation topic: 

1. A guy who was probably a stylist, judging from his mad skills (both with hair and with the ladies) was doing some girl's hair at the bar, with all these swirls and twirls and a high volume poufy front. I totally wanted that guy's hands on my head.

2. There was some movie playing on the bigscreen on the wall, and the guys had fabulously bad hair. One dude had a mullet and one dude had hair that I likened to the Leningrad Cowboys. Bartender got that reference. Points to him. That movie is awesome.

3. PJ had curled her hair into a wild early Mariah-Careyish lion's mane, which drew many admiring glances. I mean circa first album. Do you remember her hair? Not all straightened and blond like it is now. It was kinky and big and New York.

So all this set up made hair a natural topic, and Bartender told me that Vincent Gallo was his favorite actor, and that VG was his hair muse. Okay, fine, he didn't use the word muse, that's my intervention. But he did say that he modeled his hair on Vincent's, using, he said, wax, oil, and grease. And a perm.

L, who's visiting from the States, said that she found this admission very weird, and further asserted that though some people might have hair muses, they would probably not admit it and then go on to describe in such detail their styling regimen. Maybe I've just been here too long, because it's become normal to me. Like, okay, I don't have such elaborate rituals, but everyone else does, right? Can someone explain more eloquently than me why things that are totally not okay back home are just fine here?

Stripper shoes?
Beautiful man bags?
Waterfall hair?

Please don't take them away from me.