God Shave the Queen

The latest news: Britney Spears checks herself out of rehab (again) a few hours after she checked in (again). This, a week after she caused the world to collectively gasp by shaving her head.

I'm concerned. No, not about Brit's career or reputation or even mental health. What's gotten me worried is the bad PR this brings to shaving one's head.

To most people, if someone voluntarily shaves their head it must be for one or more of the following reasons:
1. Sympathizing with a cancer patient*
2. Joining the army
3. Insanity
4. Becoming a Hare Krishna

The consensus seems to be that Britney is coming in squarely at number 3. Still, like cancer patients, cadets, and Krishna devotees everywhere, I am slightly uncomfortable to suddenly have something in common with the troubled Queen of Pop.

Although I'm not currently buzzed myself, I have reason to be sensitive: I belong to a religion that has come to be linked, in the minds of many, with shaved heads. Play some word-association with the average Joe on the street, and when you say "Hare Krishna movement " you are apt to hear "shaved head" in response.

The fact is that many Krishna devotees -- especially those who are celibate monks in ashrams or serve as temple priests -- shave their heads. Like members of other faiths from the East, these devotees shed their locks because it is clean, simple, and an external symbol of an internal commitment to a life of renunciation and service.

Recently my wife asked her brother -- who is currently doing a stint as an apprentice to some New York City monks -- why he shaves his head (which, as he explained it, can be a pretty involved procedure when done by 12 monks in a Lower East Side apartment-come-monastery with one tiny bathroom). "It's simpler," he explained, "Once you shave up, you just don't have to worry about your hair. You just don't think about it, and you can spend your time doing other things." For an aspiring transcendentalist, that's a sweet deal.

Of course, Britney may not have had such lofty ambitions in mind. If reports are to be trusted, she was disturbed at the time, mumbling something about "not wanting to be touched" while she stunned the salon workers by grabbing the buzzer and lopping off those million-dollar locks herself. Still, as crazy as she might seem right now, I wonder if Brit is inadvertently stumbling towards some spiritual advancement.

It's true. We tend to invest a lot of our identity into our hair (think a purple mohawk, or cornrows, or Jennifer Anniston). Our hairstyles can start to embody the most superficial and shallow notions of who we are. And then we use them -- ridiculously temporary and fake and meaningless as they might be -- to attract and be attracted by others. Like in some bad science fiction movie, the hair defines us, controls us, and eventually just takes us over. Maybe this was Britney's way of trying to take some control back.

If so, then I can share with her the lessons I learned when I shaved my head. There were benefits, to be sure. No longer a slave to my many hair care products, I could resign myself wholeheartedly to spiritual tasks. The problem, though, was that I'd catch myself constantly glimpsing at my bald-headed reflection in a mirror (or any reflective surface). The glimpsing quickly turned to a full-fledged obsession over the shape of my hairless head. I could barely get through a meal if it was served on stainless steel, distorted versions of my bald image staring back up at me from every spoon, plate, or bowl. Soon enough, I became so self conscious that I found it hard to be Krishna conscious at all. Vanity, I found, takes more than a buzzer to be rid of.

.vbd.

* Note: The NBC medical comedy Scrubs showed a character shave his head to sympathize with a patient, only to be mistaken for a Hare Krishna devotee. Despite himself, he ended up hanging out with the devotees, although he claimed not to have been affected by them. "Praise be to Krishna!"