My two stories are nostalgia: the first is related because I had long hair and got free booze with a cut. The second is better, but tangential.
Longhairs
My own experience with free booze and haircuts is opposite to the author's. When I was a longhair back in ye olde 90s I only got free booze with my $60 haircuts ($100 in current dollars) at the salon. The local $10 barber ($15 in current dollars) was known as "the porno barber" because of his magazine selection. I couldn't go there because he only offered a boys-regular cut: your choice of #1 to #4 on the sides and back, and short as he decided it to be on the top.Eyebrow ring
Going into college my parents listed three reasons they would yank me out of school: 1) getting an earring, 2) getting a motorcycle, and 3) getting a girl pregnant. I got an eyebrow ring a couple months before Easter.All three rules were threats and not promises - my parents graduated in '65 so they were more yuppie than hippie. Moreover the eyebrow ring wasn't a direct violation of the "no earring rule" so I was pretty sure I was in the clear. Oh, and I had an ace up my sleeve.
I arrived home with a small band-aid on my left brow. The lie I told was that I had caught someone's watch in the face while playing volley ball. This was believable and believed until about day three. Pressing the thing flat was agitating and caused me to rub it frequently, and the bump under the band-aid caused my mother to fret about infection. So there was a showdown.
And here is where I pulled the ace out of my sleeve. I asked my mother to tell a story she had told several times. The point of the story is that her mother (born 1905) was a square. When my mother came home from college with pierced ears she was yelled at because "only white trash and immigrants get their ears pierced."
I asked my mother to recount the story and she finished with the moral - that her mother was stodgy , unlike herself, and couldn't understand that times change. At this point I took my cue and ripped off the band-aid.
My mother started dry heaving into the kitchen sink. And I quote "how could you do this to the body I gave you?" There was about ten minutes of that: her using the drain as a microphone, between heaves.
She got over it, my father rolled his eyes, and the reconciliation was that I'd wear a band-aid when their friends or our relatives were about (my other grandmother was born in 1903). After graduation I took out the ring with the help of a mirror, two pairs of needle nose pliers, and three beers. There remains a pair of pinpoint scars but they aren't visible without close inspection.
PS, due to a full childhood the eyebrow ring scars are the last of a horde of nicks you are likely to notice. My chin, elbows, knees, fingers, palms, shins, and face are all sparsely populated with fading white lines and dots. God bless bikes, creeks, knives, snakes, and all other non-lethal hobbies that boys are apt to chase.
Update: My mother emails with a correction: there was no dry heaving - she was just looking away and down into what happened to be the kitchen sink. We'll compromise and say she was just poised over the sink and coughing [this is a good example of how compromise is generally shit].