I grew a mullet
I didn't really want a mullet, but my hair has a kind of afro-ness to it that meant that I couldn't really grow it long or I'd end up looking like a white kid that got kicked out of the Jackson Five.

Anyway all my mates had long hair and I wanted to be like them so I just grew it at the back. It looked fucking awful, especially when combined with the glasses and the bad skin that cursed my teenage years. I kept it for a couple of years, then on the day I left school I went to the barber and got a short back and sides -- the same style that's done me for the twenty-odd years since.

Anyway my embarrassment at this follicular faux-pas had almost entirely dissipated by the time of my wedding, some dozen or so years later. I'd been quite merciless in my destruction of all photographic record of it, erasing a whole chapter of my life in order to escape the horror. But I didn't bank on my best man's sneakiness or my Mum's ingenuity: she remembered the one and only remaining pic, nestling unharmed inside my old passport which she'd stashed in a drawer somewhere.

It was with some surprise, then, that -- after having sat through a This Is Your Life style recap of my first 30 years (and the hairstyles) -- I witnessed my so-called friend instruct each and every one of the assembled guests to reach under their chair, where they would find a golden envelope containing their very own copy of the photograph in question. For years afterwards I'd wander into a friend's kitchen, only to be greeted by my own morose, mullet-bound mug staring back at me from under a magnet on their fridge.

Bastards.
( reallywittyname veraciously conspues lexiphanicism on, Thu 23 Sep 2010, 13:41, 1 reply)

For the past 18 years I have had a clipper cut for the same reasons. Horrible, horrible 80's hairdos of poodle perms and girl mullets. My heart sinks for you - I never went so far as to get rid of the photos, but I understand the pain.
(boozehound is drinking your bar dry, Tue 28 Sep 2010, 4:20, closed)