On Having A Ponytail

by Justin Anderson

I used to have pretty short hair. Then I grew it out for about two years, just to kind of see what would happen. Now, as a kid I always wanted to have long hair (yeah, I know, it’s stupid), but because my hair’s so bushy (think Kramer from Seinfeld by way of Buckwheat), my parents never let me. Then, when I hit high school, I was too conscious of looking like an idiot.

So, to get to the point, a couple of years ago I decided it’d be cool to let it grow out, y’know? So I did. After a while, it got long enough to tie back into a ponytail, which I occasionally wore in public. As someone who had short hair for most of his life, I began to notice the changes this caused in my life. The differences in the way the world interacted with the new me; not Justin, the guy with short hair, but Justin, the Ponytailed Man.

One of the first things I noticed in my new ponytailed life was my ponytail’s amazing ability to get caught in things. See, what I failed to fully realize as a short-haired person was that having a ponytail means going about your life with a . . . thing hanging off of the back of your head. (Lengths, obviously, vary.) For example, when you have short hair, you can take all the time in the world to walk through a door. With a ponytail? Better pick up the pace, Slick.

People also have interesting reactions to the ponytail. I dropped my umbrella on the subway once, and someone politely called, "Hey, Ponytail, you dropped your umbrella!"

"Thanks," I replied. "Thanks for that."

I noticed another strange post-ponytail change in my life when out to dinner with a friend of mine. When the maitre d’ came to seat us, he looked at my ponytail and gave me a weird, knowing look.

"Right this way, sir," he said before leaning in to whisper, "Don’t worry, sir, you’ll be taken care of." He winked, and when he turned to lead us through the restaurant, I saw that he himself was the bearer of a ponytail. He seated my friend and I in the V.I.P. section, and we ate for free.

Before long, I was receiving loads of great job offers, my number of friends increased exponentially, I started hobnobbing with the rich and famous, and started sleeping with far more supermodels and hot female rock stars than I had been before the ponytail.

But after a while it got to be more trouble than it was worth, so I cut it off.