Burt Reynold's Hair

I found out about this blog thing from a friend of mine who is living in Germany. In fact, I had never read a blog, know nothing about blogs, or had any intention of having a blog. This appears to be something that will be changing.

My friend and I lived in Kansas City in a cute little brownstone off of the Country Club Plaza. That was probably the most urbane I have ever been or ever will be. I was actually raised in the backwoods of Arkansas. There I was living in the city with an opera singer and helping to manage a successful restaurant. We will leave out the part where I was self destructing. That part was a Lifetime movie, at best. This, of course, would never have been on Lifetime as there were no battered women in the story to have been played by Valerie Bertinelli or Judith Light. Also, since John Candy is dead, there is nobody to play me.

What does that have to do with Burt Reynold's Hair? There is a connection between everything above and old Burt.

While I was setting up my blog profile, there was a personality question that came up dealing with my hair. Thus, I started thinking about my hair this morning. Not that I am one to obsess, mind you. There was a singer in Kansas City, or rather a music major that really couldn't sing all that well. His name was Steve. Not fat, gay, opera Steve...(any fag that lived in K.C. in the late 1990's will know of whom I write), but tall, geeky, Jesus Christ Superstar Steve. One day while wearing his bellbottom jeans, bowling shirt, platform shoes, and Hilary Swank "Boys Don't Cry" haircut, Steve decided that I had Burt Reynold's Hair.

Steve was about 19 or 20. He was a rather fun young man, and if as cool as he thought he was, he would have been fab! Just picture a cross between Marilyn Manson and Pee Wee Herman and you are there.


When I had been in Steve's age bracket, it was the new wave 80's. We had all agreed to eliminate anything that looked like it could have even touched the 1970's from our wardrobes. Plus, of course, hair was everything. And I had serious 80's hair. Bleached hair, black hair, blue hair, pink hair, spiked hair, asymmetrical hair, cut in a pattern hair, overly manicured hair, and most of all, the kind of hair your mother hates hair.

Now, all the clothes that I hated had returned, and with remarkable staying power, I might add. At this point, I had settled for the Dockers and J. Crew style. I was looking in the vintage stores and seeing things like that which I had burned selling for hundreds of dollars. Steve and his group would spend an hour doing their hair and walk out of the bathroom looking like Alfalfa from "Little Rascals". Since I still committed the unpardonable sin of using a blow dryer (and yes...even mousse) and was a whole decade older than them, they tagged me with Burt Reynold's hair.

As I am prone to do, I dismissed them all with the amused wave of the aged queen, knowing in my heart that they were just ignorant youths who were being led down the path of bad taste by the other sly aged queens running the fashion plate from New York. Ha!

Then it is time for Pride Day! It is going to be outside and Everybody who is Anybody is going to be there. Steve shows up in his bowling shirt and the jeans with the BIG BELLS. Opera Steve is poured into a bright neon orange t-shirt and a pair of Daisy Dukes that would have made Jessica Simpson question the length...not to mention that they were small enough they would have probably fit her. The stench of "CURVE" came off of him like a heat wave. Lizasita, our little chubby (this was his pre-meth body)Hispanic Liza Minelli wannbe (nobody can remember his real name) was running around with me. (I always tried to explain to him that in no plane of reality can a 21 year old chubby Mexican boy become an old Jewish/Italian Broadway star.)

I had on chinos and a Dockers shirt. I thought this would be casual enough. My hair was not even high enough to have its own zip code. It was in its usual bleached state (Now it is just half grey). I get to the Pride Festival. It was like I was wearing a tuxedo. Of course, there is a sea of bowling shirts, muscle shirts, leather straps where shirts normally go, and shorts in every form of deconstruction that you can imagine. The boys were lovely, the hair looked uniformly like shit from person to person, and I realized somewhere between 1985 and 1995 I had been kicked off the bus and no longer belonged with the people I had marched for, demonstrated for, and been tormented at our college pride festivals for.

I in my 30's and I was OLD. I went home, ALONE, on Pride night (something that had never happened before) and indulged in some combustible refreshment. It was then that I had to admit the torch had been passed and it was time to accept the harsh age limits of the gay world, or become the old trolling wretch that I had long avoided. The Steves were the new gay and I was the old model. Before I went to bed, I went into the old fashioned white tile bathroom of our brownstone and washed all of the Paul Mitchell right out of my former crown. Looking to the sky with a tear of despair, I reached up with a hand full of pomade and vowed that with God as my witness, I would never have Burt Reynold's hair again.

Now, I am looking at the face of 41 (42 in a week and a half...egads!)in my cold and cuel mirror, and realizing how much worse things have become. I read somewhere that 40 is the new 30, so maybe I can turn it all around. There is still time isn't there? (If there isn't, then just allow me my hope and illusions) But I can't think about that now. Yes! I will think about that tomorrow. Because after all. Tomorrow is another day. Where the HELL is that cheesecake?