An Anecdote from Law School: Hair

FOR ILLUSTRATION ONLY--THIS IS NOT MY CLASSMATE

Our fathers were a generation of men with short hair and shined shoes. When the ‘70s rolled around and their sons started growing long hair, the fathers’ ire took on religious fervor. Alongside the I-405 freeway near Bellevue, WA, somebody had piled stones to spell the words, “Jesus Saves,” but somebody else changed it to say “Jesus Shaves.”

     My classmate, “John Doe,” wore hair long past his shoulders, plus a mustache and a beard. He wasn’t entirely a counterculture type—he was an army veteran of the Vietnam war—but dressed in his black motorcycle duds, he looked the part. Then one day he showed up clean shaven. “What?” I asked him.

     It was what his father wanted most, he explained. “I bet him that he couldn’t go without drinking for a month, and I lost.”