Marked by up-to-dateness in dress and manners
I just got a hair cut.
The first hours after the sheering feel awkward, no less now than when I was 10. I remember a certain Peanuts strip of early vintage: My memory of that strip starts with Snoopy as a recipient of generous, loving hugs from the girls of Peanuts. Pig Pen sees what the girls are doing and asks if he can have a hug, too. Pig Pen is rejected, and the girls skewer him saying they would never hug someone as filthy and slovenly as him.
In most of his appearances Pig Pen revels in his filth, but this time he decides that the prospect of getting a nice hug from the girls is worth the effort of cleaning up. He showers, washes his hair, and a few frames later returns to the girls, this time smiling and radiating cleanliness. His clean appearance is a sort of nakedness, as when a heavily bearded man shaves his face for the first time in many years. Pig Pen’s arms open wide in anticipation of a warm embrace but he is instead rejected again. I forget now exactly what the girls said to him to shoo him away but the strip ends with Pig Pen’s halo of cleanliness turning to a rippled, distorted cloud of rejection and confusion. Pig Pen then returns to a mud pool and feels like his good old self again.
That one frame, where he returns to the girls with his open arms, is often how I feel immediately after a haircut and a shave. The drawing shows Pig Pen with a stunning halo about him, a halo made all the more striking for how we have only ever known Pig Pen to be a filthy mess. I would not say that I feel like a filthy mess before getting a haircut — nor do I expect a hug after getting a haircut — but that cut and scrubbed post-haircut feeling always reminds me of the Pig Pen halo.
