Dork'd

On Monday morning Noah suffered humiliation at the hands of a certain parental pair. I held his head still; Liz wielded the scissors. Ten seconds were all it took to lop his bangs into a line so straight that we could have used an overturned bowl as our guide. Yet the clock was ticking too quickly for us to move on to his noggin’s backside, or those feathered wings flaring out behind his ears, whose comedic value had been instantly quadrupled by our forehead job.

The situation has now been rectified; we are not monsters. But for a good eight hours there, Noah was sporting a pageboy mullet capable of redefining the far frontier of dorkdom.

His mother will claim otherwise. She will say he was cute and adorable even before we finished the job that evening. Don’t let her fool you. If I learned anything from my own childhood, it is that mothers are uniquely incapable of recognizing nerd coiffure, especially that which they have commissioned. Back-to-front, Noah suggested nothing so much as a tribute to Billy Ray Cyrus and Mr. Spock.

Noah, your daddy is sorry. But take comfort in this, son: the photographic record contains nothing in the way of a close-up shot.