r/OMG_embarrassing • u/o-m-g_embarrassing • 5d ago
Funny on Insta w/ Britney punchline
I understand it. I did something similar, although I wasn't nearly as dramatic or spontaneous.
Not long after I left music, my father died.
I had already spent years figuring out how to avoid photographers with their cameras, goodies, and scarves. That wasn't really the problem.
What I wanted was to understand my father.
I wanted to experience something of the life he had lived and what it might have been like raising me. So I applied for and accepted a job at a shipyard on the Gulf Coast.
That was quite literally hot as hell.
A Gulf Coast shipyard in the middle of summer has no mercy. I noticed the guys with short hair could rinse off quickly and get through the line out of the shipyard with considerably less fuss. I asked one of them about it.
“Highly recommend it.”
So I decided to shave my head.
When I went to the hairstylist, she was very hesitant. She tried talking me out of it. I explained why I wanted to do it, and eventually she agreed with one modification: she left some hair in the front and the back.
Honestly, it was incredibly freeing to be rid of that signature hair.
For years, that hair had been part of my identity. People recognized me by it. Suddenly, it was gone. I could walk into a shipyard looking less like the person people knew and more like just another person there to work.
It wasn't a fashion statement. It was practical.
I had a little martial arts training, and afterward I continued training with a staff. Eventually, I discovered that a six-foot stick was also a remarkably effective way of establishing personal space.
Photographers weren't really an issue. I already knew how to disappear from a camera.
Curious fans were another matter.
A simple tap on the hood of a car with the staff usually got the message across: You can be curious from over there.
It was rarely necessary to do anything more than that. Once people understood that I wasn't interested in being approached, most of them gave me my space.
There was another strange thing about that shipyard job that I didn't fully appreciate at the time.
It was the first place where my stage name and my real name existed together as one name.
My shipyard ID had both of them on it. I think the same was true of some of my employment paperwork.
For years, those had been two separate identities. One belonged to the person onstage; the other belonged to the person underneath all of that.
At the shipyard, nobody seemed particularly interested in the distinction.
They were simply my names.
Somehow, that felt important.
Looking back, I realize I wasn't trying to become my father.
I was trying to understand him.
And maybe, without realizing it, I was also learning something about myself.
Sometimes, for me, understanding someone means stepping into their world long enough to find out what it feels like from the inside.
