Israeli Mullets & The Glue
Episode 11:27:2023 - Prompt: Humor
Where Humor took me…
My partner & I met in Los Angeles, a cosmopolitan city when it comes to self-care, ablutions, and personal style, but he is from a small town in the Midwest.
He is a naturally handsome person from a classical perspective. Tall, strong features, warm smile, and - at the time I met him - long, curly hair that he wore in a sloppy bun.
He didn’t do much with his hair, and it worked.
For that reason, he was given the nickname E-rakeem Noah, a combination of his childhood nickname - Keem - and the basketball player Joakim Noah in honor of his loose hair bun.
About a year into our relationship, still living in separate apartments, he asked if I would cut his hair.
I come from a beauty business family. All of my haircuts were done by my grandfather, a hair dresser.
This doesn’t mean I inherited the gene.
I set up a chair in the middle of my living room in front of a mirror. Had him sit down. Put a towel around his shoulders and began gingerly trimming his locks.
The difference between before and after was barely perceptible.
When we traveled through Australia for 3 months, his hair grew even longer. We returned to LA, and he wanted it all off. A friend recommended a salon in West Hollywood called Mino.
Mino, the namesake, has been in business since 1982. A veteran stylist.
Being from a small town, my partner doesn’t have the "This is what I want” way of talking to a barber or hairdresser. He asked me to communicate it for him.
“He would like it short but natural. Nothing chiseled.”
Mino started in on my partner’s hair. I sat behind them in a chair, looking at my partner in the reflection of the mirror in front of him. Mino talked and told stories without missing a snip.
Then he stopped and said, “What do you think?”
My partner looked at me like, Help!
He had the Business in the Front / Party in the Back cut.
Before I could protest, Mino burst out laughing.
“I am kidding! It’s a mullet! I am kidding!”
Mino is Israeli and has an accent in English.
“I am keeding!”
We all laughed, as he continued to finish the haircut to perfection.
Now, whenever I say something as a joke, I say:
“I am keeding! It’s a mullet! I am keeding!”
(Only my partner gets it!)
Which brings me to the humor of friendships.
I’m proud to say I have a lot of funny friends.
This is not a coincidence.
Humor is the glue.
Even in my earliest memories, laughter attracted me to people. From my ability to make them laugh or their ability to make me laugh, which of course is a give & take of laughter, I’ve bonded with funny people.
I never discriminated between the kid whose dad was on the board of Goodyear or the kid whose mom worked on the campus maintenance crew.
If there was humor to be had, we were tight.
There are studies that support the positive influence of humor on our mental & physical health. I know that any situation deemed as serious - not life-threatening, but formal - already gets a smile on my face.
During the “lockdown”, I posted:
I’m very funny… around people.
The first gathering I went to was a yoga retreat in the Algarve. It seemed that as much as yoga, we all were craving laughter. And I didn’t disappoint.
I mined every person there for their sense of humor. Some were quick to the call. Others took a few days to relax into it, but ultimately we were all smiling & hugging saying goodbye.
Historically, I was more often the receiver of humor, but as I’ve aged, I’ve become the friend who makes others laugh.
It feels so important to keep that instinct sharp.
Humor is a dish best served unexpectedly.
This post is not meant to be funny.
It just wouldn’t work.
The point is to honor my friends & family who - thankfully - are ready to give & receive humor under mundane & extraordinary circumstances.
YOUR TURN: Where does HUMOR take you? You don’t have to be funny, although it never hurts. Maybe you - like me - need that physical contraction of stomach muscles along with a loss of breath and tears rolling down your cheeks to really feel human!
Share your story of HUMOR in 150 - 200 words.
POST IT IN THE COMMENTS SECTION.
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Happy writing!
It is so funny for me that Humor is the prompt this week. Funny - ironic, because I just recorded a podcast on Humor as a tool in child therapy. I developed a technique using humor to help young autistic children overcome phobias. When I can get my little preschool patients to laugh, when I for instance show them a video, backwards in slow motion, of me ‘un-getting’ a shot, or get them laughing as they pretend to torture me giving ma ‘100 shots’, get them laughing as we send a plastic car across the room under the power of an actual (incredibly loud) hand dryer that usually scares them, the hand dryer I ended up buying on Amazon just for this purpose, when I get kids laughing with me and their parents, having a blast together, as we play with what has terrified them, the thing loses its power over them, stops making them terrified, and they can triumphantly get their shots, go into a public restroom, get through their days, with less fear. Podcasts, workshops, powerpoint talks, research projects, book chapters, all part of my serious work on humor. There are so many jokes when one’s serious work is about humor. When I get nervous before giving a workshop on the topic my husband will make silly jokes to get me to laugh. Haha. This usually does actually help, not so much because he makes me laugh, but because it makes me feel so loved by him. Seriously though, we did have alot of laughs recording the podcast! The people who interviewed me are funny. Very meta, the whole thing.
One thing that was hard about my dad dying over the pandemic was my little brother being in New Zealand, and deciding to stay forever.
When he came back last summer I could finally laugh about all the things that other people find alarming or odd, not funny.
Do you remember when Dad said, ‘Kids! Come and watch this! And we ran into the kitchen and he expertly flipped a knife high into the air but it sailed past his outstretched hand and stuck in the middle of his foot.’?
Remember when Dad used to paint neon patterns on garden snails and once he wrote YOU MISERABLE BASTARD on one and couldn’t stop laughing at the thought of an old man doing his gardening seeing it crawl past?
Remember how we would shoot dried chickpeas out of his ‘blow pipe’ (a long copper pipe) at pigeons out of his window?
Remember when dad used some tubing, a mirror and a dart to pierce his own nipple?
My brother’s back in December and we’re going to see Dad’s girlfriend and our three half brothers. We’ll retell the stories and they’ll make us all laugh.