The Hamlet Makeover, Part One

[collisionwork]

Okay, so by popular demand (which, in the case of this blog, means one request, hi MS!), I rushed to get together the photos of "The Hamlet Makeover, first steps."


That is, the first tryout of my - perhaps deeply misguided - attempt to go a reasonable blond to play Hamlet. Why I feel so determined to make this change for this character, I don't know - nothing to do with Scandinavian-ness or tradition, I just don't feel right the way I look for the part. But I needed help, help that came from an unsettlingly excited fiancee.


Yes, Berit was very excited at getting to play with me for hours on end like one of those Barbie Styling Heads (she gathered the implementa, calling "Makeover time! Makeover time!" in a high voice a la Gypsy from Mystery Science Theater 3000, more than slightly-creepy, really). [*UPDATE BELOW]


And within a few hours, this transition had become a reality:






An effective enough transformation, it seems. Yesterday at the deli across from The Brick, where, like most groceries we go to regularly, the people behind the counter all assume Berit and I are married (and we don't bother to correct them), the cashier looked back and forth between Berit and I, then asked her, "Your husband's younger brother?" Omar, the sandwich-maker, called to Berit in mock-annoyance, "Whaddya do to my customer?!"


Good. That's good. Still, not quite there yet.


And we went through a bunch of stages on the way, just for fun, which you can see after the cut.





So, as usual when getting rid of the beard, I like to do an homage to Frank Zappa along the way, shaving it into what is variously known as a "Genghis" or an "Imperial." Zappa grew it originally in homage to his teenage idol, Johnny Otis. On me, it doesn't quite work the same:





I like it, but it doesn't make me look like either an iconoclastic rocker or a Greco-American R&B bandleader passing for Black. I look like I belong in a western, maybe as the kindly doc or an ill-fated friend of the taciturn hero.

Trying to do an actual "Zappa" face doesn't help:





I wind up looking like the mean drunk at the end of the bar who's about to get shot for saying something improper about the hero's horse.

So, I moved on to try rockin' the 70s-style 'stache, maybe going a little Tom Sellecky . . .





Hmmmn. I think I look like I should be starring in that classic work from Caballero Home Video, Yards of Leather.

I've always wondered about going the John Waters route, with the pencil-thin moustache (which he did in homage to Little Richard):





Aaaaaaand . . . no. I look like a supercilious French stereotype from a 1930s Lubitsch film or something.

Let's just take it all off --





"Mentat Piter DeVries reporting for duty!"

Years ago, I ADed for a director who, liking to do all the BIG DRAMATIC strokes in his work while leaving me to go in and add all the subtle, "deep" touches, referred to me as his "Mentat." Besides the division of duty, he said I also had the Mentat's bushy eyebrows and redder-than-usual lips. This was the start of me being a little self-conscious about those caterpillars on my forehead.

Which, combined with my wider-than average upper lip area, results in a, frankly, odd face in some ways.

So, what happens when I finally get those eyebrows taken down to something normal?





Okay, well that's a keeper. Great, I'll be doing this unpleasantness from now on.

You can maybe see from the change of light the hours that passed between this and the previous photo (the sun, moving around windows in the previous shots, had gone down and I'm now only lit by the light bulb above me). Berit really went to town with those tweezers, shaping and thinning. It was worth it.

So then we went for the dye. We had chosen one that was supposed to turn my hair shade into an ash-blond. We hadn't counted on how deeply reddish-brown my hair actually is.

We dyed it once. It came out a slightly-redder, slightly-lighter brown. So, we did it again . . .





Getting there . . . getting there. As I said, not quite there yet, but actually acceptable, really. It looks wildly different under different lights, too, anywhere from strawberry-blond to deep Irish copper.

Now to figure out the best way to get it a bit lighter and a lot less red . . .


Meanwhile the diet and exercise proceeds apace. I'm lighter - not much (10-15 lbs.), but I feel it. More to go -- I want my 1993 cheekbones back. Maybe. Maybe . . .



*UPDATE: Berit disputes almost every word of this, saying the only part she was at all excited about was seeing the "pencil 'stache" and that I make it sound like she was jumping around the place like a loon. Okay, I exaggerate a bit, maybe, but I stand by feeling a hair unnerved by what I perceived as being a subject for someone's unholy experiments. She disputes most of this note as well: "Am I going to have to start my own blog? Anyway I had a Barbie Styling Head and it gave me nightmares!"

Comments

[justjohn.livejournal.com]

The pics are more fun in reverse order.

The only times I've let facial hair grow in, I've discovered I have a large bald spot along my right jawline, which would make most beards undoable.

Which is kinda too bad, because I've always wanted to shave off a beard half at a time, maybe going out into the world wearing the left half of a beard.

[collisionwork]

Didn't do the backward scroll before -- I like it.

I have a bit of a bald patch in my beard area, too -- it's grown smaller over the years, but it's still there, at the point on the left side of my face where "moustache" joins "beard." I used to have to grow the hair around the patch extra long to cover it, but now it's not so much of a problem.

And I suppose you could always just grow half a beard on the left side, keeping the right trimmed, and then walk around, but you'd have to avoid people until the half-grown thing was done.