Joanne Klassen and Tony Beardy
This week when I arrived to lead a writing class at his high school, I met Tony, whose hair I admired from across the room. I strolled over and told him, “That looks like an expensive hair cut.”
“Nope. Not if you’ve got a family member who knows how. You could even do it yourself if you had the clippers.”
It was a perfect Mohawk–wide, black and standing straight up on top with the sides neatly shaved.
“How do you get it to stand up like that?” I asked, a little in awe.
“It’s like that when I get out of the shower, it’s natural.”
I have short blonde, thin, fine, lazy hair. It just lays there. That very morning I had washed it, dried it with a curling brush, put mousse on it, sprayed it with hair spray, used a curling iron, and still it just lay there, flat as a pancake.
I know it’s not a good idea to compare ourselves with others. That’s a dead end street. My husband would say, “Be glad you’ve got hair.” He jokes that he has eleven hairs in seven rows. It’s not true; he’s just self-conscious of a small bald spot. He’s got nice white hair and a beard.
Tony told me about the kind of writing he does, it’s called Fan Fiction. I had never heard of it, and no one my age that I asked had either. I’m glad he explained it to me. He even introduced me to Crossover Fan Fiction by going to Safari on my IPad. He’s a cutting edge kind of guy, which I might have known from his hair cut.
I’m glad I found myself at R.B. Russell High School for the Transformative Writing class this week. I made a new friend with an amazing haircut and learned about a genre of writing I never knew existed. Once we got busy writing I forgot all about hair envy.
© Joanne Klassen
