"Hair," There and Everywhere

Give me a head with hair, long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen….
                                                                                                    -James Rado and Gerome Ragni

It was always exciting when my older sisters came back from college for a visit, but nothing beat the time they came home for a break with their Hair soundtrack in tow. Their purpose was to shock my father, who was still listening to Jerry Vale and Lawrence Welk at the time.

Of course, I was intrigued, as any 12-year-old might be, and I eagerly followed the three of them into the dining room as my sisters started playing the album for my Dad. The song “Sodomy” came on, and I was fascinated. Despite priding myself on having a pretty good vocabulary, I did not understand one word of the song. My father suddenly realized I was sitting there, and said, “Sharon, you’re a little young for this, so you’d better leave the room.”

Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me away from hearing the rest of that album, but my father could have if he wanted to. I had to think fast, which was never my forte. I always think of exactly the right comeback about an hour after I need it. However, this time my response was quick and perfect.

“Well, Dad, if I’m really too young for it, I won’t understand it anyway,” I reasoned, “and if I understand it, then I mustn’t be too young for it.” I waited, holding my breath to see if he would buy it.

The three of them regarded me silently for about 30 seconds, Dad suspiciously, and my sisters with a mixture of astonishment and shock. Anyone who knows my family can imagine how rare an occurrence 30 seconds of silence was in our household. Then, my father turned to my sisters, and said, “And just which one of you taught her THAT??” Ha! They were getting the blame. “Oh, no, it wasn’t us,” they quickly defended themselves, “She came up with that all on her own.” It was clearly against his better judgment, but my father let me stay.

I don’t think my sisters converted Dad to becoming a member of Hair’s musical tribe that day, but I was hooked. I loved the album so much that my sister let me borrow it, and didn’t reclaim it until several years later. I listened to it. I inhaled it. I was consumed by it. I spent some of my precious time at the Carnegie Library looking up all the words in the song “Sodomy,” doing my research the old fashioned way, in hard copy dictionaries. Just intellectual curiosity, I assure you, in the interest of improving my vocabulary.

Hair was jubilant, and defiant, and completely captured the hippie scene of the time. It was interesting musically, but the beautifully poetic lyrics about sex, love, drugs, politics, race, war and (naturally) long hair, absolutely took my breath away.

When I was 13, Hair came to the Nixon Theatre in Pittsburgh. My friend Casey was going. Casey was and still is one of my very best friends. Our friendship had its roots in our mutual appreciation for pop culture musical phenomena, namely the Monkees, who hit the scene when we were in fifth grade. We were the most avid “Monkee Lovers” in our class. Casey was very cool, and so it was no surprise that she also had one of the coolest mothers around. Mrs. B. actually took us to see the Monkees at the Civic Arena when they came to town when we were 10. It was my first “rock concert.”

Mrs. B. not only agreed to take Casey to see Hair, she bought a third ticket so that Casey could bring a friend. Naturally, I wanted to see Hair at the Nixon, and I wanted to see it with Casey and her mom. However, despite my parents’ resignation to my obsession with the Hair soundtrack, the stage play involved full frontal nudity which, surprisingly, was not featured on the soundtrack. Casey and I were both sure that my parents would never allow me to see Hair, so she was going to ask friends with more liberal parents. I was envious, but happy for her, and she promised to tell me all about it.

Then a strange thing happened. Those liberal parents of Casey’s other friends said no! Although I knew it was futile, both Casey and I thought that I could at least ask my parents if I could go.

The moon must have been in the Seventh House and Jupiter was obviously aligned with Mars when I asked my parents if I could go see Hair at the Nixon Theatre with Casey and her mom. They barely looked up from their newspapers. Sure, they said, as long as Mrs. B. was with us. My parents would let me go almost anywhere as long as there was an adult chaperone along, and they liked and trusted Casey’s mom. So, suddenly, I was going to see Hair at the Nixon, a dream come true.

Casey and I could barely contain our excitement as we arrived at the theater. Her mother led us to our seats which were…..in the last row in the theater. It dawned on us that Mrs. B. purposely bought tickets in the last row, to keep us at a safe distance from the actors on stage during the infamous nude scene. She might have been the coolest mother, but she was still a mother.

Well, Casey was pretty upset. She accused her mother of treating us like children- we were 13, after all! Her mother was largely unapologetic. I sat between them. Our seats didn’t bother me a bit - I was just grateful to be at this particular party. Casey, on the other hand, was still a little bitter about it when we discussed it the other day.



The program- courtesy of Casey B. 

 The show began and it was absolutely glorious- everything I had imagined and hoped for, and more. Of course they sang all the songs that I knew and loved so well, but it was more than just a show. It was an experience, a happening. It felt like we were hangin’ with the tribe, and their energy filled the theater, to the very last row. The nude scene was so darkly lit that the silhouetted bodies of the actors left me with no more of an idea what the male anatomy looked like than when I arrived. However, I could now say, truthfully, that I had seen Joe Mantegna naked. He played Berger in the show.

That production of Hair was about the closest I would get to living the hippie lifestyle, unless you count my stint as a member of the Folk Mass Group in high school, or the fact that as an adult I went to Grateful Dead concerts when they came to Pittsburgh. I had planned to be a hippie when I went to college, but by the time I got there Nixon was out of office and the war in Vietnam was over, and alas, the hippie scene had also passed.

Because of Hair, though, I get to occasionally revisit that place and time in America’s history. We saw it couple of years ago at Robert Morris University’s Colonial Theatre, with real live college kids who really got into the spirit of it, despite having no first-hand knowledge of the sensibility of the time.

Then last week we saw the revival of Hair when it came to Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh with the Broadway series (a subscription was my son’s generous Christmas present to us). This was a fabulous production with the same exuberance I remember in the first production I saw all those years ago. But this was a really good show, not a happening, because these fine young professional actors weren’t there in the 60’s. This became apparent when one of the young tribe members working our part of the balcony during the show kept high-fiving people. We didn’t do that in the 60’s.

It was clear though that we middle-aged-and-beyond members of the audience were fondly and nostalgically remembering the days when Hair first took the stage. And let’s face it, “Give me a head with hair, long, beautiful hair” had even more meaning than ever for some of us.