shoulder length or longer

Watching BBC news last night, I learned some of the story of Hair in Great Britain. I recalled listening to the musical’s LP at home with my parents in the 70s. The production was a groovy thing, I thought. I didn’t see it and would have been rather scandalized, I’m sure, if I had.

For me, those days in the late 60s pulsed with freedom. I saw the sanitized, variety-TV versions of what was going on. But I had known the restraints, I thought, that were now loosed: girls no longer had to wear dresses to school; boys could have hair cuts other than crew-length. And I liked guys in longer hair. Oh, yes.

I hadn’t come from the 50s or the 40s. Didn’t really get the first-hand anger of those older kids who’d felt repressed by previous generations’ rules that lacked meaning for them. The ground had shifted under everyone, because it somehow had to. The kids had broken free; their way was so cool. And yet, the world wasn’t everything it should be, still.

We new crop of teenagers just needed to dance wildly, swing our long hair and macrame accessories, and hope the draft would end soon.

Young adults today, at least the ones I’m closest to, tend to think the peace-out children of the sixties had the right ideas, in some ways, at least. But they’re not going to react the same vociferous ways in the public arena. Times now call for lower case typing online and movie-watching etiquette. Subtlety. They don’t wish to expose every body hair on stage. It’s been done. Disillusionment was, I suppose, unavoidable.

But hair’s still long, and for this gift, usually, I say, “Right on.”