THE WAR has been on for four days (or two years, or twelve years, or a thousand years), and I took the kids for haircuts. It’s one of those kid-places with balloons and play areas and horrible music, which, if you’re a professional crank like me, means any music at all. For some time now I’ve planned to switch them to a regular barber shop, where the magazine rack has worn copies of “Popular Science” and “Field and Stream.” Nothing against where we went, you understand; they’re just catering to their market. But we go there all the time, and the joint drives me nuts. The eight-year-old boy on our right was getting his hair dyed blue (temporarily, I think), and his mother was looking on lovingly, and the one on our left was having his hair spiked. And my oldest asked if he could have his hair spiked, too. I considered several approaches and served up the hardy perennial, “No.” Naturally, he volleyed back his own perennial, “Why?” Whereupon I rushed the net with a killer smash: “No spikes, no colors, no tattoos. Ever.”
The war has been on for four days, and some of our soldiers are dead, and I took the kids for haircuts. And I told my son there was no way he was going to get anything wilder on his head than was already there, and our hair-stylist-person-sales-associate, a pleasant young girl, smiled at me and said, “No earrings, either, huh?” I checked her eyes for sarcasm, found none, and said, “Have you seen those press conferences with Tommy Franks and his aides? Just make them look like them.” This jolted her a little, possibly because she thought Tommy Franks sounded like someone on “The Sopranos.” (“Boss, this is Paulie’s new crew: Joey Steaks, Jimmy Tomatoes, and Tommy Franks.”) So I dipped into my endless supply of patience and said, “General Franks. You must know him. Or one of the other generals. Think of anyone in uniform at a podium in the Pentagon. Like that.”
