FRIDAY,SEPTEMBER13,2019 | THEGLOBEANDMAIL O A
T
wenty-four-years old. Remember? The
youth. The energy. The lust. The whole
world just waiting for you to sink your
teeth into it and become something.
Well, that’s me right now. Just another wide-
eyed 24-year-old idiot floating around the uni-
verse. And honestly, this idiot’s doing just fine. Col-
lege grad, career with benefits, deeply in love and
I’ve stopped inhaling Pizza Pops half-naked in my
mom’s basement (now I do that in my downtown
apartment). There’s just one thing missing from
this proverbial “prime” I currently find myself in:
my hair.
I started losing my hair at 17. Now, it’s all gone.
Going bald was the doom I seemed destined for.
Family events, whether it was Christmas with
Mom’s side or barbecues with Dad’s, were like con-
ventions for male-pattern baldness. I used to look
at old photo albums with my grandmother and
pick out my ancestors in every worn-down, sepia-
toned picture, completely unaware of who they
actually were. Stocky, pointy nose and a shining
chrome dome? That’s an Easton.
Next page, Gramma.
My hair, when it was attached to
me, went through its own special
phases. There was the bleached-
blond highlight phase during the
boy-band epidemic of the early
2000s, which, by the way, perfectly
complimented my puka-shell neck-
lace. Then came the emo bangs of my
middle-school days. Yes, that was a
good look: chubby, prepubescent
goth boy stuffed into skinny jeans.
After that, I toned it down with Bie-
beresque wings during my early high-
school triumphs.
Then, at just 17, I began to enter
the great recession: My hair started
falling out. It began with a strand on my pillow.
Then a small clump flew off in the hot air of a blow
dryer. My once, luscious locks were turning to a
frail, coiff-y hair-do, barely sitting on top of my
skull.
I was too young for this. I mean, I knew it would
happen someday but not this early. I should be in
the pharmaceutical aisle shopping for my first
pack of condoms, not my first hair-loss cream.
I started wearing hats to hide my shame and
combing my hair over to cover my embryonic bald
spot. The reactions to my hair loss were enough to
stifle the already vulnerable confidence of a testos-
terone-doused teenager such as myself. It’s strange
how a look can hurt more than words, maybe be-
cause it makes your own brain do the heavy lifting
of putting yourself down.
My self-esteem was plummeting. I knew I had to
do something. I could either fight it with the chem-
ical ingenuity of hair-loss-prevention treatments
or give in and shave it all off.
In every applicable sense of the meaning, I was
at a loss. I was going through all the usual hoopla a
late-teen has to go through and, on top of every-
thing, whatever was on top of me was falling out.
I went to the one resource I knew who could
offer sound advice, my follicly challenged father. In
a George Costanza meets Gandalf sort-of way, my
bald prophet spoke: “Zac, I knew you were going
to be bald from the moment you had hair. I never
questioned any haircut you got because I knew
someday it would all fall out. Just like mine did,
and my father’s did, and his father’s before him
did. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. You don’t
need it.”
Wait. I don’tneedhair? I’d never thought of it
like that. I need my heart. I need my brain. My legs,
maybe. But my stupid hair? That’s not a part of
what makes me, me. It was a revelation. My break-
through. Like a flaming phoenix with thinning
feathers, I was reborn.
And with that, I was ready. It was time to start
the first day of my hairless life. I locked myself in
the bathroom so no one could interrupt this intim-
ate, deeply personal moment. I stared in the mir-
ror, repeating over and over that everything would
be okay. I scrounged through the cabinet under
the sink and pulled out my dad’s electric buzzer. It
came in a fancy leather case, a case that seemed far
too ritzy to carry just a cordless shaver. It clearly
belonged to a pro. The vibrating buzz of the razors,
moving back and forth in hyper
speed sent a nervous shock pulsing
through my veins. I mean, imagine
right now, shaving off every single
hair on your head. Nerve-racking,
right? Now think of yourself doing it
before you were old enough to legally
enter a bar.
I took a deep breath, shut my eyes
and began to move the buzzer
against the back of my scalp, slowly
bringing it to my dwindling hairline
on-the-run. Like a suburban father
cutting his lawn, I continued to move
the hair mower in an orderly fashion,
each section I completed made me
feel more and more free. Once I fin-
ished, ear-to-ear, temple-to-temple,
front-to-back, I opened my eyes.
Beautiful. Spherical. Smooth. Sensational.
Dammit, I loved the way I look. It’s like I was
born to be bald. I ran downstairs, parading my new
(lack of) hairstyle around the house. My mother
applauded and cheered. My father looked at me
the same way he did when I scored the overtime
winner at my peewee hockey championships:
sheer pride. As if to say, welcome to the club, my
son. You did it.
And now, I carry this hairless head high. I’m a
student of the ways of the bald. Studying the
greats, like Stanley Tucci, Mr. Clean and a personal
hero, Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson. I shave my
head down to my scalp every Sunday with a four-
blade razor, eliminating anything even close to re-
sembling a hair. I keep my canvas clean and
tanned to avoid looking like Dr. Evil or that danc-
ing guy from the Six Flags commercials.
From a red-faced teenager, with a will as soft as
his feathery hair, I became a proud bald man. I’d
enter my 20s ready to take on anything that came
my way, and it’s all because I realized, thanks to
my dad, that to do what you want, you have to
own who you are. I lost all my hair but gained all
the confidence I ever needed to succeed. Not to
mention all the money I save on haircuts.Zac Easton lives in Winnipeg.IKNEWI’DLOSEMY
HAIR–BUTAT17?
ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM DE SOUZAAtfirstitseemedunfair,butI’mnowastudentofthewaysofthebald...
withalltheconfidenceIeverneededtosucceed,ZacEastonwritesFIRSTPERSONWait. I don’t need
hair? I’d never
thought of it like
that. I need my
heart. I need my
brain. My legs,
maybe. But my
stupid hair? That’s
not a part of what
makes me, me. It
was a revelation.Have a story to tell? Please see the guidelines on our websitetgam.ca/essayguide,
and e-mail it [email protected]First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readersL
ast winter, Soulpepper Theatre gave us some minor
Harold Pinter withLittle Menace, a selection of his
short plays, which in my estimation was cleverly
staged but unsatisfying. Now, happily, we get major
Pinter, conventionally staged but more rewarding, with the
company’s production of his 1978 dramaBetrayal.
The Nobel-winning playwright’s most enduringly popular
work – it inspired aSeinfeldparody in the 1990s and it’s cur-
rently on Broadway again in a British revival starring Tom
Hiddleston –Betrayalcoolly dissects a seven-year extramar-
ital affair by cunningly working backward. It opens after the
affair has ended and then proceeds to track it, over seven
scenes, from the final breakup to the first kiss.
Ex-lovers Emma (Virgilia Griffith), a gallery owner, and
Jerry (Ryan Hollyman), a literary agent, are meeting in 1977,
two years after they called it quits. Over drinks in a pub,
Emma reveals that her husband Robert has just confessed to
being unfaithful to her. But then, Emma was unfaithful to
Robert for seven years with Jerry. And Jerry, who betrayed
his own wife, also betrayed his relationship with Robert, his
colleague and oldest friend.
Later, Jerry meets with Robert (Jordan Pettle) and is
shocked to discover that Robert has known about his affair
with Emma for years.
At that point, the play begins to rewind. Two years earlier,
we see Jerry and Emma making a brusque last visit to their
secret love nest, a flat in London’s
Kilburn district, and deciding
what to do with the furnishings.
A few scenes later, we see them
during one of their first trysts at
the flat, making passionate love.
And so we are borne back,Gats-
by-like, ceaselessly into the past.
Watching a love revert from its
withered, bitter dissolution to its
vibrant full bloom has a melan-
cholic fascination and Griffith’s Emma embodies it palpably
here – helped along by Ken MacKenzie’s apt costumes. Cold,
irritable, attired for business during the breakup with Jerry,
later we see her bounce into the flat in a bright orange sun-
dress, radiantly eager to see him. And sure enough, when the
affair begins in 1968, she’s rocking a sexy afro and platform
shoes.
The play’s two central scenes involving Robert are, how-
ever, the most powerful ones. In the first, he learns of the
affair while he and Emma are on holiday in Venice. After
that, back in London, he has a lunch with Jerry in which his
hidden knowledge of his friend’s betrayal manifests itself in
drunken, aggressive behaviour. Pettle’s tensely smiling Rob-
ert masks his inner anguish with brittle bonhomie and flip-
pant self-criticism. The lunch scene is Pinter at his best, as is
Robert’s earlier quiet confrontation with Emma, when direc-
tor Andrea Donaldson treats us to one of those classic blood-
chilling Pinter pauses.
If this is first-rate Pinter, however, it’s not quite a first-rate
production. MacKenzie, who also designed the set, provides
a solidly realistic decor of wood-panelled walls, Persian car-
pets and seventies-era furniture, which clashes with Donald-
son’s attempts at a more fluid and imaginative staging. The
backward march of time is signalled by a heavy-handed Ri-
chard Feren score. (His preshow mood-setter, however, a
soundtrack of 1977 rock classics, is a lot of fun.) Finally, the
show is handicapped by Hollyman’s Jerry, whose mannered,
comical performance feels like it belongs in an Alan Ayck-
bourn play, not a Pinter one.
But if you can look past those faults, there’s the pleasure
of Pinter’s precisely crafted dialogue, where behind every
seemingly oblique or irrelevant comment lurks a shadow of
meaning. It’s a play in which a few recurring images–achild
tossed in the air at a party, a solitary trip to the island of
Torcello – gain meaning with each repetition. And then
there’s his artful exploration of the play’s eponymous
theme.
At one point, Robert, a publisher, criticizes a new novel,
apparently also about betrayal, declaring that there’s noth-
ing new to say on the subject. It’s one of Pinter’s sly jokes. In
Betrayal, an intricate dance of deception where even love is
betrayed by time, he shows us that on the contrary, there’s
plenty still to be said.Special to The Globe and MailBetrayalcontinues to Sept. 22. (soulpepper.ca)Soulpepper’stakeon
a1978dramaisfirst-rate
Pinter,butnotquite
afirst-rateproduction
MARTINMORROWTHEATRE REVIEWBetrayal coolly
dissects a seven-year
extramarital affair
by cunningly
working backward.Betrayal
YOUNG CENTRE FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS IN TORONTOWritten by Harold Pinter
Directed by Andrea Donaldson
Starring Virgilia Griffith, Ryan Hollyman and Jordan Pettle
★★TODAY’SKENKENSOLUTIONTODAY’SSUDOKUSOLUTIONNEWS |