Hairnets and Haredim
Mar. 17th, 2007 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusYesterday Hisae was trimming her hair. When she'd finished, she collected a handful of cut black hair and showed it to me. "I could wear your hair on my head!" I said, and we started arranging her hair on top of mine. It was quite easy to tease it into styles then fix them with hair spray.
We'd decided to go to lunch at Imren, a devoutly Muslim kebab restaurant near our house. I found that my borrowed black hair looked better when held in place by a hat, but the final effect was uncannily Hasidic. The impression was enhanced by forecurls and strings hanging off my trousers (yachting pants that tie up at various places on the leg). I found myself adopting a walk to match the look: the "Williamsburg Bridge Walk" -- stooped forward with concave shoulders, looking neither left nor right, hurrying anxiously to my destination. I got some long, strange looks at Imren -- the kind of place where, on Fridays, the staff chant "Allah, Allah" as they carve at the meat wheel.
Later, I went to Olly Prestele's new Cocolo ramen restaurant (now open daily at Gippstrasse 3 in Mitte) with neighbours Lina and Jan. At Lina's birthday party in a bar nearby I met about ten people I'd never met before. They took me, black hair and all, at face value, as we all tend to do (after all, you don't tug a stranger's beard to see if it's real). I asked a Canadian girl called Lee if she'd noticed anything strange about my hair -- confessing that it actually belonged to my girlfriend. "Now you mention it, I did think you might be wearing a hairnet," she said. "But I assumed that hairnets were just the latest trendy thing around here."
We'd decided to go to lunch at Imren, a devoutly Muslim kebab restaurant near our house. I found that my borrowed black hair looked better when held in place by a hat, but the final effect was uncannily Hasidic. The impression was enhanced by forecurls and strings hanging off my trousers (yachting pants that tie up at various places on the leg). I found myself adopting a walk to match the look: the "Williamsburg Bridge Walk" -- stooped forward with concave shoulders, looking neither left nor right, hurrying anxiously to my destination. I got some long, strange looks at Imren -- the kind of place where, on Fridays, the staff chant "Allah, Allah" as they carve at the meat wheel.
Later, I went to Olly Prestele's new Cocolo ramen restaurant (now open daily at Gippstrasse 3 in Mitte) with neighbours Lina and Jan. At Lina's birthday party in a bar nearby I met about ten people I'd never met before. They took me, black hair and all, at face value, as we all tend to do (after all, you don't tug a stranger's beard to see if it's real). I asked a Canadian girl called Lee if she'd noticed anything strange about my hair -- confessing that it actually belonged to my girlfriend. "Now you mention it, I did think you might be wearing a hairnet," she said. "But I assumed that hairnets were just the latest trendy thing around here."