Just Saying No to the Keith Cut

We took our children in for a shearing this weekend, and as always, the hair stylist asked if we wanted the hair off of the children’s ears. I’ve seen that this is starting to come back into fashion, probably because of that Justin Bieber kid or because of the Hanson brothers or the Jonas brothers or whichever or all of the kiddy sensations who and whose fans were not alive in the 1970s and whose parents are braindamaged from the same.

Me, I just say no to the Keith cut.

I lived through the 1970s, and I knew my share of people named Keith. Strangely, you don’t see anyone under the age of forty-something with the name Keith. The Keiths from the 1970s killed that name not just for generations, but for generations of generations. And those Keiths all had hair over the ears:

The Keith cut
Some random 1970s yearbook picture from Google Image Searches, but there’s an 82.093% chance of certainty that his name is Keith.

Longtime readers are going to say But didn’t you keep going on about growing up in the projects? Well, I did, and the Afros with hair picks stuck right in them was a popular style then for the some of the guys. Others were Keiths with this Ken-doll equivalent of the Farrah Fawcett hair or something. A little long, a little wavy, a little groovy, a little Qaaludy.

I know what you’re saying: Brian, you’re just jealous that you never had a cool haircut like that. Well, you might be right. My mother believed in telling the barber (in those days, children, you went to a barber with a candy-striped pole to get a hair cut–it was just like the 1950s, except for the shag carpet, the love of brown and avocado, and all the other differences) to give us a little boy’s cut, which resembled the hair that snapped onto the little people that came with Legos before cool little people came with Legos.

My haircut from the 1970s

I don’t put that on my children, but I most assuredly will make sure the hair is off of their ears no matter what Flock-of-Seagulls/mullet hybrid comes into fashion in the next decade. Mismash of bad 1980s hairstyles is tolerable, but any symptoms of the 1970s must be suppressed.

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