My friends, I have a confession to make. To the seven others of you who may read this column, you can hear it too. I have a secret. If you don’t know me very well you might have no idea. You might even know me pretty well and not suspect. It’s hard to notice. You may only spot it when I’m running around trying to play a sport, or when I’m talking to you face to face. You may have even observed that at the naked party two weeks ago I was trying to hide something. But then again, maybe none of you have picked up on the hints of it yet.

You see, my friends, I have a receding hairline.

I know!

This, of course, is a huge disaster in my life. Think of the consequences! Now, I only have a few years to marry rich in exchange for my good looks. People will stop mistaking me for Jonathan Brandeis from SeaQuest. Rumpus, the ultimate authority on good looks, may strike me from their 50 Most Web site. Pretty soon, the recession will expose the scar on my scalp from when I was six and our mounted moose head fell off of the wall in my house and landed on me.

Imagine this, you desperately lucky young people. Imagine your beatific demise rapidly approaching, limiting your ability to charm people into thinking you have any number of talents and capabilities. That’s right, you remember the “Halo Effect” that we learned about in Intro Psych — good-looking people are associated with all sorts of positive attributes, like intelligence and athletic ability.

Bald people are associated with George Costanza and noisy farts.

Stalin? Nero? Chairman Mao? All bald.

Hitler? Don’t be silly my friend. That’s a weave if I ever saw one.

This emergency had to be addressed, so recently I began researching online. There, as usual, I found a wealth of information.

First, there is Rogaine. On their website all of the men are happy, handsome, and hairful. BECAUSE THEY ARE MODELS. One of them is in this month’s J.Crew Secret Sale e-mail. You know that guy.

In addition to implying that the use of Rogaine will make me handsome, muscular and a catalog model, they manage to obscure the fact that Rogaine has been clinically proven to cause hair growth in “undesirable areas” of the body. To be honest, I thought there already was hair in the undesirable areas of my body. That’s part of what makes them undesirable. Where is this hair going to grow, on my eyeballs?

Propecia’s not much better. They at least have photos of real men on their website, but their side effects include, and I quote, “less desire for sex, difficulty in achieving an erection, and a decrease in the amount of semen.” So not only will I not be handsome or get a modeling contract, I’ll also never have babies or hard-ons. Every boy my age wants babies and hard-ons!

At least Rogaine had the dignity to lie about it.

So then I went to www.sainiherb.com. Now HERE is a solution for balding. Instead of doing scientific research, “Dr.” Saini traveled to India. There he “discovered that the locals apply a crude version of herbal extracts derived from leaves of rare plants that wildly grow on the higher peaks of the mountainous regions they live in. These people do not consciously use it as a hair treatment; instead, it is a part of daily regimen they found their fathers and forefathers going through and so they continued it. The result is a thick, strong and healthy head of hair.”

Of COURSE! How silly of all of us here in America. We should have been watching our forefathers! I don’t know if I have any forefathers, but my grandfather puts witch hazel in his hair to keep it looking nice and limp. It also has a healthy shine!

So tomorrow, I’m going out to get some witch hazel. They even have it in aerosol form now. They’ve just thought of everything these days.

Thanks Dr. Saini!

Chris Rovzar ’03 doesn’t want you to tell anyone he is going bald.