cut my mutton chops and shut the hell up

I have to thank my parents for certain genetic attributes. I have really great skin, with half the wrinkles that women younger than me have. My teeth are excellent and cavity-free. And I'm naturally thin and with great metabolism. That's the good stuff.

The not so good stuff is the Hair Gene, courtesy of my father. If you've ever met a Middle Eastern person in your life, you know what I'm talking about. You would think being half Persian would mean I'd be less furry than the full-breeds, but I drew the short end of the DNA stick. Hair was omnipresent in my life, starting at an early age. In preschool and through high school, it was the unibrow. When I hit puberty and begged my mom to help me pluck, she forbade it, worried I would whittle it away and wind up looking like Jean Harlow. In junior high when I had to don those tacky blue gym shorts and start shaving my legs, the hair would return the next day thicker and nastier, almost like Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors.

And then, the sideburns, probably the most unsightly of all Persian hair issues. How I wished, growing up, for the thin, wispy sideburns of my fair white girlfriends. They could wear their hair back in a ponytail and not be mistaken for a werewolf. I was not so lucky. At every haircut, I insisted that the stylist break out the clippers and tame my long Elvis chops.

This process worked fine until recently. I changed salons and found a great stylist. She had the audacity to go on maternity leave and refer me to Kelly, who is in the anti-clipping camp. Upon seeing my burns, she refused to touch them.

"You should go natural!" she chided me. "By cutting them, you are making them grow back even thicker!"

"Yes, but that theory also goes for shaving my legs," I retorted.

"I am not touching them," she declared, "and all those stylists who cut them were foolish to do so."

I couldn't believe it. She really wouldn't touch my sideburns. I asked her again at the end of the session to trim them and she balked and said she couldn't. She couldn't.

At home, I decided to give them a chop to shorten them. But I was distracted watching Magnus out of the corner of my eye, so what I thought was a straight clip was actually a bad angle. Luckily my hair is long enough to hide the boo boo, but I was still pissed. I'm the client. Can't you set aside your self-righteous opinion and do what I want?

Clearly not. I commisserated with a girlfriend who also has the sideburn issue. She said she's been told not to clip and to accept her natural gift of bushy, unsightly side hair.

It's a ploy, I think, to keep them all laughing at us.