Height and Hair--Dangerous Combo?

Perhaps being tall is so advantageous because women cannot see the top of your head?  This NYT piece suggests that balding is and perhaps should be[given the attitudes it presents] a confidence killer.  I guess I was being real strategic when was in my late twenties to tie down woman since I would start, ahem, getting sun-burned up top as I turned 40. 

I was faced with the clear evidence of joining the other 80 million Americans in the group of the increasingly hairless (that stat includes women) the first year I taught my big intro class.  One of the students in the class video-taped one of the last classes of the term.  I tend to walk back and forth while I lecture, and so she was able to tape the back of my head.  I could not deny then the reality that there was a bunch of flesh where hair used to be.

And how have I responded?  Drugs?  No.  Plugs, nyet.  I don't even obsess about it.  The lack of hair is conveniently located in a place that I rarely see.  I mostly notice it in winter time where hats itch more than they used to do so.  I started wearing a bandana while playing ultimate very, very early in my career, so I have not had to change what I wear in summer.  I have resisted buying one of those sprays (as displayed by Beau Bridges in Fabulous Baker Boys).* 

Perhaps I can do so, as the article suggests, because I am married.  If I were to become single, would the first step be changing my hair status quo?  Nope, it would be shaving my beard, which has increasingly gray.  I didn't need the five stages of grief to deal with my hair loss.  Just a good sense of humor and the luck that my old hairstyle has the effect of a combover so I can deny combing over.  That and the fact that the man I have respected the longest has been bald for as long as I have known him.  Of course, he has a snazzy mustache, so perhaps that does the trick.



*  We forget about that scene because everything Michelle Pfeiffer does in that movie erases all that came earlier.  Yowza.  I mean, whoopee!  I am speaking, of course, of her singing.