Hair!

Went to see a rough cut screening of what is tentatively called "The Beard Project" yesterday. I quite liked it once I got there. Getting there was all about me trying to turn the wrong way onto one-way streets, but the popcorn I had made and ate nervously while driving helped make it all ok. By the time I'd arrived, all the popcorn was gone, though. I'd hoped to bring enough to share.

I like how good stories are about one thing, and invariably another. This movie's story was obviously about beards, but it was also about being on the margins of society, about how men are asked (or demanded) to conform, about the little things we all do to protect ourselves and about the filmmaker herself.

I can't remember, or better yet, I don't remember because I've never actually seen it, but I feel like the musical Hair might have some of the same themes. How is it that it can mean so very much to do something as simple as not shave your legs (think of the country song "Did I shave My Legs for This?!?")? I remember cutting my hair very short within a month after I moved to San Francisco from Athens, Georgia, in part because I wanted people on the street to leave me alone. It worked, or the attitude that I wore that haircut with worked.

Now that I think of it again, though, I could very well have been cutting my hair when I moved here as an act of mourning. At the time, I didn't have any large bowls of olive oil and brewers yeast covered popcorn to keep me sustained as I kept trying to turn into oncoming traffic.