TKM

Sometimes we need our mates to point out the obvious, to challenge our sense of normalcy. Normalcy in this case being a slight blurriness of the world—about which I had been audibly rueful on more than one occasion—thanks to glasses whose prescription remained predictably static as my eyes merrily continued their maturation process.

Our vision degrades most noticeably during that first decade after we’ve been prescribed our first corrective lenses, or so I was told by an optometrist during those formative years, when my prescription seemed to turn on the whim of a fruit bat (a species which—non sequitur alert—was recently discovered to have a menstrual cycle similar to that of humans).

Once we get over that 10-year hump—as did I in my 20s—we expect to tuck into several decades of more-or-less stabilized impairment, changing glasses according to whims determined by nothing more than our own idiosyncratic sense of style.

I didn’t know I was about to fight this vision war on two fronts.

“I’m going to write you a prescription for separate single-vision reading and distance lenses or progressives,” said the 15-year-old optometrist who examined me.

“Progressives, like bifocals?”

“Yes, but because you have a reading-intensive job, you’ll want a wider field of vision in your reading glasses, so I recommend you keep them separate,” he said, avoiding the b word. “But like I said, I’ll write the prescription for either or.”

So this is how bifocals happen. No one sits you down in a quiet room to break the news, or presents them as an optional upgrade—“Tell me, Ms. Morrison, have you ever considered progressive lenses?” You just turn 40 and the next thing you know you’re at LensCrafters* weighing the merits of juggling two pairs of glasses versus the do-it-all wonder of bifocals, now euphemistically re-branded “progressives.”

(*Ordinarily I would balk at patronizing big-box vision over my friendly neighborhood optometrist, but I don’t live in a friendly neighborhood, and the last time I went to a local independent optometrist I disliked him and his entire staff more intensely than I would have preferred given how much money I was giving them. And even if le domestique hadn’t been the one to set up my appointment—after I approached her with my old glasses and pitifully asked whether she thought a broken piece might be successfully glued—I might have recalled that LensCrafters has a program wherein they repurpose old prescription glasses through clinics where some needy someone with a level of vision impairment remarkably similar to my own can walk away with my ex-glasses, which I suppose kind of makes us sight sisters, each with one not-so-bad eye and another eye that just doesn’t try very hard at all. Just imagine, someone in some dusty village in Mali could be walking around in my Oakleys, or those Giorgio Armani torties I wore in college, or even those ill-advised John Lennon glasses I bought back in my early 20s—apparently without looking at myself in the mirror first. I hope all the new owners of my old glasses get to look at themselves in the mirror first. Do Malians have a “geek chic” equivalency?)

Other than the bifocal thing, it had been a pretty routine exam—except when the tech insisted that I “guess” after I failed to pick up any more than two dimensions in the last couple of lines on a depth-perception test.

I blinked hard and opened my eyes wider, as if to let in more of the magic required to gauge depth, and scrutinized each line for its 3-D letter again. “Dunno,” I said, shaking my head for emphasis.

“Guess,” she repeated gleefully, like she was the keeper of some really awesome gossip she was dying to tell me.

“Can’t I guess ‘none’?” I asked. I really wasn’t trying to be difficult, but I didn’t want to randomize, because it seems to me that eye exams would have a sort of inverted guessing penalty. Like, SAT scoring assesses fractional point deductions for wrong answers, but here, correct guesses could result only in compromised vision assessment.

“Just guess,” she said doggedly.

“OK, I guess ‘none,’ ” I said firmly, because I’m no fun at all.

Later, five minutes into my post-exam shopping, the same woman walked up behind me and asked if I had found anything yet.

“No, I’m still looking.”

“I’ll help you,” she said gamely.

I didn’t want her to help me. At all. I had le domestique on hand for any necessary consultation. Besides which, the saleswoman/tech whose name I’ve forgotten clearly had taste dissimilar to my own. For starters, she wore a pink blouse, and also, she was recognizably female.

“Um, maybe give me some time to get an idea what I want first,” I said.

“If you tell me what you’re looking for, I can make suggestions,” she said, punctuating her eagerness with a little bounce on the last word.

If you get any pushier, I thought, I may make some suggestions of my own.

I glanced around the store to confirm my suspicion that other shoppers were being allowed to go it alone. Maybe pink blouse thought she could mentor me and save me from my own worst instincts. Surely she doesn’t look that way on purpose, pink blouse may have thought, filled with a sense of altruistic purpose. I will help her look like the female of her species.

Employing a language of certainty, I managed to shoo her away, but only for a little bit. I’m a very slow shopper, and anyone who thinks I can make a decision about something I have to wear every day—on my face—in a period briefer than, say, the menstrual phase of a fruit bat (24 hours) doesn’t know me at all. Even if my brain’s processing speed weren’t impaired, my decision-making capacity and I divorced ages ago. (Typical sad story: It wanted a level of trust I just couldn’t give it, so it ended up shacking up with some teenage boy who, it bragged petulantly, never questioned it, ever. Last I heard they were doing 20-to-life in the federal pen.)

Pink blouse was back. “Have you found anything?”

I know when I’m beat. I retrieved all the frames I had liked and put them in the little velvet-lined staging area she was holding. If it’s possible to grant someone else some small happiness at no cost to oneself, one really should.

But there was a cost, because now, based on the frames I had chosen, pink blouse thought she had a bead on my baseline taste and commenced her mentorship by showing me frames that, to her, resembled what I had chosen but had a little more of the something she thought I should want, like maybe rhinestones.

I’m not a fashion-forward girl. In fact, I find some fashion so disagreeable it’s viscerally upsetting. For instance, it makes me angry that the very worst fashion instincts of my mid-’80s high-school era are galumphing attitudinously down the catwalk in 2007:

Ill-fitting high-waisted (called “paper-bag waist” in the industry) jeans? Et tu, Diesel?

Because my fashion sense shoots blanks, I generally jones in one of two frame directions: rimless, or something evolved from your standard-issue GI horn-rims. (I can’t wear contacts, as I found out when I was going through the hiring process for the LAPD—yeah, I know, more about that another time—which requires contacts instead of glasses for officers who need vision correction. I got insane levels of calcium deposits no matter how diligent I was about cleaning my lenses, and my optometrist said that just happened with some people. I imagine that for the right contact-intolerant candidate, the department might have granted special dispensation to wear glasses, but we never got to that bridge—my psych evaluation required disclosure of my mental health treatment history, making whether or not I could wear contacts utterly moot.)

Pink blouse was having none of my standard-issue nonsense, as she tirelessly brought me frames that I pronounced too shiny, too flashy, too glossy, too trendy, too sparkly, too clubby, too colorful, too Dolce&Gabbana, etc. She cajoled me into putting some of them on, for her, but I drew the line when she approached me with frames that had a sort of pink undertone.

“They’re pink,” I said.

“They’re not pink.”

“They’re pink enough,” I repeated, assuming the crossed-arm stance of a child refusing cough syrup.

“Just try them. I want to see them on you,” she said.

I shook my head and turned away from her. We’d crossed some weird line now, like I was shopping for school clothes with my mom circa 1974. Why can’t I pick out my own frames like all the other kids?

Once we had settled on five frames, one of which she had picked out—yeah, I threw her a bone—I sat down at one of the fitting stations and began assessing them in a more concerted way. I eventually narrowed my choices to three, and hers didn’t make the cut. It came down to a rimless frame, a horn-rim-esque frame, and these racy frames in a frost-gray color:

The Ray-Bans were pretty flash for the likes of me, but I really liked them. I especially liked them on the shelf, and I tried like hell to like them on my face. I put them on, I took them off, I put them on, I took them off, I put the horn-rims on and took those off and really quickly replaced them with the Ray-Bans, like if I could do that fast enough, then maybe I could effect a side-by-side comparison with myself. Le domestique weighed in; she liked the horn-rims best. Pink blouse weighed in; she liked the ones she had picked out that I had already eliminated best. Then pink blouse shopped me around to her coworkers, and I put on and took off all the frames for them too, imagining as I did so that to a person they were thinking, Well, sweetie, they’d all look better if you grew some hair.

As you might guess, I rejected the Ray-Bans in the end. I know they weren’t actually all that flashy, but they were just flash enough that when I put them on I couldn’t get past the idea of a 40-year-old who had just been prescribed bifocals making a lame play at fashion relevance. Like maybe I should just go get some paper-bag waist jeans to go with them.

Instead, I embraced my age, though I took the optometrist’s advice to get separate reading and distance glasses—and not just to avoid the idea of bifocals; I understand that I’m still fighting a two-front war—so once I narrowed my frames to two, the only choice that remained was which prescription to put in each. That was pretty easy, since I was really the only one who particularly liked the rimless pair; they would be my reading glasses, leaving the frames with three-way approval (with the caveat that pink blouse still liked the ones she had picked out best and was only on board with this second choice as a conscientious objector) as my all-the-livelong-day glasses. These are they:

But wait, there’s a denouement.

The standard-issue pair was ready the same day, that being the whole LensCrafters about-an-hour shtick, but rimless glasses take longer—about a week. So I reported to the store the following Saturday—wearing my other new glasses, naturally—to pick up the not bifocals. I gave the optician my name and sat at the fitting table. When she presented them to me, I took off my glasses and replaced them with the new pair, causing her to gasp theatrically.

“Oh, my God, those are so much better on you!” she said with a big sunny smile on her face. “They’re like night and day!”

I looked silently back at her, wondering whether she would dig this hole deeper or go ahead and knock off for the day.

“Your old glasses, I don’t know, they just didn’t suit your face, but these were a great choice,” she shoveled.

I waited another beat before I said, “Actually, these are just my reading glasses. The other ones are my primary glasses; I got them here last week.”

A blank expression flickered ever so briefly across her face before she rebounded. “Oh, well, they’re both great,” she said, then bid me, “Put the others back on.”

I did, and she said, “Yeah, you made two really great choices.” Then we proceeded to my fitting, over which there was some disagreement as to whether the glasses were sitting crooked (my assertion) or my face was itself crooked (her assertion). Rather than argue against the latter, I proposed that an adjustment be made regardless, making the glasses either rest even on what I thought was my properly balanced face, or align with rather than against this newly reported asymmetry. She made the adjustment, but she also made it clear that this was one of those customer-is-always-right gestures, which she might rephrase as “The customer is always right inasmuch as I’ll do any stupid thing they ask so long as they understand that they’re actually wrong.”

A few weeks ago le domestique complained on her blog about our Select Comfort bed, and much to our surprise a real-live Select Comfort customer service representative read her post and attempted to address the problem. So it’s not completely outside the realm of possibility that LensCrafters representatives are currently standing by and—beyond marveling at my copy editor’s fastidious attention to the styling of their company name: solid, with an internal initial cap—wondering how my already great shopping experience might have been even better! So here are some takeaway lessons:

1. Don’t make clients “guess” when they and their eyes reach an impasse during the exam.
2. Don’t stalk clients as they shop.
3. Trust that the client probably thinks about her personal aesthetic more than you think she does, and that she means with all her heart to look like that.
4. Never insist that a client try on frames she doesn’t like, not even for you.
5. Don’t grimace when a client tries on a frame she has picked out—unless the client grimaces first.
6. If the client grimaces when she tries on a frame you picked out, don’t try to coax her out of her unfortunate fashion retardation. No means no.
7. If the client makes a blanket assertion that she does not like, say, pink or rhinestones, assume that she won’t like anything you bring her in the pink or bejeweled family. If the client says she doesn’t want anything “too Dolce&Gabbana,” assume that this includes, among others, frames actually branded Dolce&Gabbana.
8. If you think the client is being a poopyhead about all your great suggestions, see rule 2.
9. Never insult a client’s old glasses—even if you think the new ones are ten thousand times better—not just because they might not be such old glasses but because regardless of how old they are, she picked them out at some point, liked them at some point, and has likely been wearing them—in public!—for a considerable length of time. She doesn’t so much want to hear how lame they were.
10. Even if the customer isn’t always right, pretend that she is right about the symmetry of her features. Arguing with her about whether her face is crooked benefits no one.
11. I cannot emphasize this enough: Disclose the price of the lenses the first time a client asks, and when she says she doesn’t need scratch-resistance, glare protection, or any other treatment jacking up the price of her lenses, don’t insist that the optometrist prescribed the upgrades. Doctors do not prescribe scratch-resistance.

Other than that, everything was great.

——————————————————–

Update: As alluded to in rule 11, pink blouse tried to up-sell me numerous unnecessary lens treatments without disclosure. Her initial quote included a charge of $300 for the lenses alone, with no description as to what that included. When I said that price was absurd, she sort of shrugged her shoulders like a bored teenager. It wasn’t until I insisted on being shown a schedule of charges that I discovered her quote had included not only an upgraded lens material that I hadn’t asked for but numerous special treatments, none of which would have been covered by my insurance. I then specifically said I wanted absolutely basic plastic lenses—the kind my insurance would pay for—at which time pink blouse presented me with a LensCrafters price schedule listing basic plastic lenses at $120.

On February 7 I received a document from my insurance provider explaining what was covered and what wasn’t and noticed a line item for “scratch protection coating” (a treatment I had specifically declined), charged at $20, of which I paid $15. The lenses themselves—the absolutely basic plastic kind I asked for, the ones that are covered by my insurance provider—were listed at $100. Nice, LensCrafters. Enjoy that extra $15 you weaseled out of me, because your ethically challenged business practices guaranteed I’ll never come back.

Now, what was the name of that review site I ran across the other day? Oh, right, PissedConsumer.com. Must go there now.

Katherine Heigl and I don’t look very much alike. Oh, sure, there are similarities—the swanlike sweep of the neck, the winsome girl-next-door quality, the overall luminosity—but few would mistake us for twins or sisters or even species mates. Which is why it was worrying when my partner of 13 years went, well, kinda moony when Heigl arrived at The Advocate’s 40th anniversary party last week.

One minute I was holding forth about how much I dislike drinking perfectly respectable beverages out of martini glasses—

“Katherine Heigl is here,” le domestique blurted.

I looked toward the door and traced the ethereal glow to its energy source.

I would show you a picture of myself from the party, but my efforts to duck the paparazzi were apparently completely successful. Instead, here I am in my front yard.

Eerily dissimilar, aren’t we?

“T.R. must have brought her—they’re best friends,” I said knowingly, having fact-checked T.R. Knight’s cover story in which he said so. (I didn’t actually check with Knight or his publicist to confirm that Heigl is his best friend because [a] we don’t verify interview quotes unless they seem wrong, incendiary, or just weird, [b] I think it’s reasonable to think that Heigl is in fact his best friend, [c] ringing him up to ask “But is she really your best friend?” would regress us both to grade-school sensibility, and [d] fact-checking is, much as the term connotes, concerned with objective facts—spellings of proper names, exact dates, ages, etc.—whereas best-friend status is subjective, as can be seen by flipping through the autograph pages of your high school yearbooks.)

Knight was among the last of the invited celebrity hosts to arrive. I had already stalked Jane Lynch to some degree, or she had stalked me—I’m honestly not sure which. All I know is that every time I looked up she was within six feet of me, and she’s very tall, so if she had lain down at any point during the night her head might have landed in my lap.

Had Jane Lynch’s head fallen in my lap, I’d like to think I might have said something terribly witty—which would absolutely exclude “Come here often?”—but I was in a bit of a buzz state most of the night, so I probably would have said something like, “Yer hair’s pretty.”

The buzz wasn’t so much cultivated as thrust upon me. Immediately after entering the venue and ascertaining the whereabouts of the facilities, as one should, le domestique and I were confronted with one of several bars sprinkled about the event. In keeping with the evening’s general conviviality and open-bar rules, which practically insist that one take on hard liquor, I ordered a Manhattan, bourbon being my favorite among your grain alcohols.

The pretty and somewhat flirty bartender gamely reached behind the many bottles of (event beverage sponsor) Skyy vodka for the lone bottle of Maker’s Mark. She poured the bourbon generously, augmenting it with the merest glances of vermouth and bitters, and dispensed it into a Skyy martini glass. Then she frowned and, with a mock-pout that reads as sexy, said, “I don’t have any cherries.”

“Quite all right,” I said. “No garnish necessary.”

“I’ll give you more bourbon instead,” she said brightly, turning back to her bottle stock to retrieve the beverage sponsor of generations of sailors and prostitutes. Listen, nothing garnishes a 98% bourbon drink better than bourbon, especially when there’s none of that messy ice to potentially melt and throw off the delicate balance of the bourbon and air that make up one’s cocktail.

Ordinarily I’m kind of a wallflower at parties, but you know how wallflowers get with the aid of multiple-shot bourbon cocktails. Yep, I was a sort of fuzzy wallflower—like maybe a bulrush. And with all those lowered inhibitions I was not about to move along when the wall I happened to choose, sort of off to one side of the stage, turned out to be the zone where all the fancy people were queuing before and after taking the dais.

I will stand very close to as many celebrities as I please, thanks very much! Not that anyone was trying to get me to move. But, you know, sober me would have of her very own volition hustled out of fancy town to make way for fancier folk than myself.

I think I was saying something about wanting to lick William Baldwin, because really, how often do you get your chance to lick a Baldwin, when—

“Katherine Heigl needs a drink,” le domestique said with no small amount of urgency. “Someone should get Katherine Heigl a drink.”

I turned my head toward the Knight-Heigls to see them just chitchatting away with the gays. She didn’t seem in crisis at the time, but I understand an elevated hydration level is required if one is to glow so constantly. Also, I think fluids help to maintain healthy pores, and an actress can’t be too careful in the age of hi-def TV. Just as squeaky-voiced silent film stars lost their livelihood in the transition to talkies, HD may prove ruinous to the careers of the large-pored set.

“She was doing this,” le domestique said, tipping her hand toward her mouth with her pinky extended—the universal symbol for thirstiness.

Le domestique’s enchantment with Heigl was only fair. On the way to the party I mentioned that the guest I most wanted to meet—or more appropriately, stand really close to—was Jenny Shimizu. Le domestique hadn’t heard of her.

“The really androgynous dyke model from those Calvin Klein ads in the ’90s,” I offered.

Blank stare.

“She was a mechanic in West Hollywood until she was ‘discovered,’ then she became a big-time altie model,” I said. “Oh, and she was Madonna’s lover.” With that, I had offered my entire inventory of knowledge about Jenny Shimizu. “Anyway, she’s hot.”

“How androgynous is she?”

“In the Calvin Klein ads she could have gone either way,” I enthused.

“I worry about your type,” le domestique said, not being at all androgynous herself.

Over the years, and certainly in the week since the party, we’ve had a conversation or two as to “types”: whether we have them, what they are, the number of ways in which we each seem to resemble the other’s not at all.

Is le domestique interested in a willowy, blond evocation of Audrey Hepburn? If so, I’m in trouble. I go whole days and sometimes weeks without remembering that I’m a chica. And my moments of feminine lucidity are generally prompted not by a mirror but by a stranger whose quizzical eyes dart furtively from my face to my breasts and back again. (It’s fun or irritating, depending on my mood.)

Am I obsessed with straight-hipped, flat-chested boy-girls? Le domestique is very much a woman, with hips and breasts and curves and everything. She has medium-long hair, soft features, and a professional wardrobe that I would describe as “flowy.”

In light of such disparate attractions, neither of us can be faulted for worrying that we’re not keeping the home fires stoked properly.

But when we scrutinized each other’s supposed types, we stumbled on an interesting truth: We had each identified an ideal that reveals much more about our personal conceptions of womanhood than about what we’re attracted to in a partner. Mine is outwardly tough, even forbidding, and inscrutable to those who don’t know her—though in my fantasy she has a soft nougat center. Le domestique’s ideal is outwardly soft and radiant, but she’s approachable and authentic and, one gets the sense, having the last laugh on folks who only think they know her.

Heigl and Shimizu, I think, provide us with real-world faces for our personal mental constructs of gender. Mine is just a little more, um, third-sexed than hers.

Readers, you’ll be pleased to know that someone did retrieve a drink for Katherine Heigl. Sadly, I never did see Jenny Shimizu at the party; I just assumed she hadn’t made it—she’s very distinctive, and the guest list was cozy enough that one could fairly easily find anyone she might be looking for. But in the days to follow I saw pictures from the party, and there she was—with a new “girl” haircut!

Sweet Jenny, I thought we had an understanding.

(Psst. Click here to read my new piece on Advocate.com.)

Bitch is always copying me, like the annoying, aping little sister I never had. Does she see me going after K-Fed or dangling babies? No. I suppose she thinks she one-upped me by checking in and out of rehab and getting all those tattoos the same weekend. But check it out, toxic trash, my scalp is still shapelier than yours.

Due to a confluence of recent events I found it deeply necessary to shave my head. Again. This marks the second such episode in my life. Let’s call them my Otter Periods. OPs arise during times of suicidal depression, and I’ve found that mine is not such a unique response to that most perilous mood swing. In chatting with my friends at the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance forums, plenty of women have come forward to say, “You get urges to shave your head when you’re depressed? Me too!” and more than a few (straight women, at that) have also obeyed the urge. It’s both disarming and illuminating to discover that something I’ve always thought a personal quirk is in truth fairly common.

Where I may claim some diversion is in the aftermath. Many women who shave their heads during depressive periods say they do so out of an urge to self-mutilate; and isn’t it better to attack dead cell filaments than flesh? Afterward most say they found themselves ugly, and few choose to maintain the look.

My first head-shearing urge came over me in my mid 20s. I awoke one morning with a wicked compulsion to shave my head and, as if under hypnosis, I got dressed, walked to my local Rite-Aid, bought clippers, and returned home to do the deed. Under all that hair I found that I have quite a shapely scalp, and for the first time in my life I thought I looked kind of extraordinary, in a good way. I kept it buzzed for two years. Some people (friends, girlfriends) loved it; others (my mom) hated it.

I was waiting tables at the time and my tips went through the roof, the result, I think, of altered expectations. I looked serious and a bit mean, and when I proved to be a friendly sort I was rewarded just for being me—there was no change in my personality, just a shift in societal perception.

(Note: A brief period of hairlessness occurred between my first OP and this last, but because it was motivated not so much by intense depression as by a bad haircut it cannot be considered a clinical OP.)

Fifteen years on the urge made itself known again. This time I knew a couple of things in advance, namely that (1) shaving my head has vast potential to lift my spirits, and (2) I have a shapely scalp. So it should have been a gimme, yes? Well, not entirely. It’s not that I feel particularly old at 39, but I certainly feel older than I did at 25, and I had an attack of self-doubt that I could still pull this look off. Maybe folks would attribute my aesthetic choice not so much to youthful freedom as to midlife crisis.

I resisted the urge for several months.

Here’s where the aforementioned confluence of events comes in. I’ve recently emerged from a short stay in a psychiatric hospital, about which I’ll write more later. It was my first such commitment, and I expect and hope that it will be my last. I made a pact with myself that when I was released I would pull out all the stops to fight that bully in my psyche who taunts and torments me until I feel that I can no longer accept responsibility for keeping myself safe.

It’s difficult to articulate why shaving my head is for me such a powerful antidepressant. I do like the way I look, but it isn’t a simple matter of self-esteem. It’s an expression of personal freedom, a letting go of concerns over what people think. In making myself less conventionally attractive I make explicit the idea that I seek no one’s approval but my own. And there’s a powerful sense of light and calm that washes over me when I remember to live first for myself, second for those who accept me as I am, and not another moment for those who do not.

Here I am, four days on. (My hair grows like a weed.)

So, my partner and I are on vacation in the South. Actually, right now we’re staying with her parents in the little s south, where the legendary manners and cute accents are at the ready but there are still a few Democrats sprinkled about. Tomorrow morning we head for The South, where there’s at least an outside chance we’ll be burned in effigy. This could be my last blog entry, y’all.

We arrived early for the annual South Carolina family beach trip to attend a banquet last night honoring my partner’s mother, who was named her home state’s 2006 Woman of the Year, or “2006 WOY,” as said the placard at our table. Any outstanding fantasies I had about shuffling nonchalantly around the banquet hall, unnoticed by all but those bearing canapés, were dashed soon after we arrived. Upon our entrance the vigorous shaking of hands commenced, accompanied by enthusiastic affirmations about how very great her mother is and how very proud we all are and how very pleased we were to be there. And not just any hands. Gubernatorial candidates’ hands. State supreme court justices’ hands. Power hands!

It’s notable that measures have never been taken to obscure my relationship with the daughter of the 2006 WOY. I was seated front-and-center at the WOY family table, introduced to all comers as “my daughter’s partner, Teresa.”

Hell, most people didn’t even need an introduction: Dozens of strangers approached me, clasping my hand in their own as they gleefully declared, “You must be Teresa!” Not that playing “Find the Lesbian” was a tough call in last night’s environment, but the very fact that folks in her life know that there is a lesbian and that her name is Teresa indicates an openness I never expected.

Just goes to show you that expectations are only as valuable as the stereotypes that form them. Who would ever suspect it? The churchgoing Southern family with the perilously high community profile welcomes the unbaptized West Coast dyke into their inner sanctum, saying, “Hey, this is the person our daughter loves, everybody, and it’s really OK.”

Oh, sure, my mother-in-law would really, really like to baptize me, but that’s to be expected. Twelve years into our relationship, I think she understands that it probably won’t happen, and that we can even joke about the issue indicates that my stubborn aversion to salvation isn’t a deal-breaker.

So I’d like to take this moment to say that my partner was right when she suggested, in the face of my powerful impulse just weeks ago to shave my head, that maybe I could keep a thatch of hair until after the banquet. ‘Cause when I think sincerely about the strives her mother has made to wrap her head around me and fit me in to her family picture, private and public–not to even mention the vehicle and hotel room upgrades we scammed by casually mentioning our relationship to the WOY–not arriving bald to her crowning seems the very least I can do.

Sometimes you get a haircut, and sometimes the haircut gets you.

Last week I was just itching to shave my head, not because I had head lice but because I was in San Francisco, and being there reminded me of a time when I shaved my head but not my legs—an attitude that horrified most hets and a few homos too. Ah, glorious baby dykedom.

About 10 years ago I ran into a college classmate at the West Hollywood Gauntlet. I didn’t recognize her at first. Now a professional piercer covered in tats, she had been an unassuming sports dyke—a shot putter on full scholarship—when we had an autobiography seminar in common. When she recognized me I remembered her immediately. She and her track buddy used to sit across the room from me, and we never spoke even though it was clear that we were all sisters. I told her I had always wanted to break the ice with them but that they seemed unapproachable.

“Are you kidding me?” she asked. “You were fucking scary.”

It tickled me to think this mammoth alpha butch was once intimidated by me, though I wasn’t actually cultivating “scary” back in the day. While I first buzzed my head in a dark mood, I maintained it more out of utility than anything: I rode a motorcycle to school and I hate helmet hair.

Shaving my head served another important utility: My mother never again complained about the length of my hair, as long as I had some.

My partner reminded me last week that our South Carolina beach week is coming up and that now might not be the best time to revisit my lost youth, what with gay-bashing on the rise and all. So I split the difference and asked my hairdresser for a “soft” crew cut. God love a West Hollywood hairdresser: My boy’s not afraid to get out the clippers when I say “summer cut.”

I don’t spend much time on the motorcycle these days, but I do bicycle—a pursuit for which I gladly shave my legs—and I still hate helmet hair. With this cut, when a shower isn’t readily available, the sweat generated on a ride is generally enough to revamp and restyle.