Toupée III

OK, there's more on this. To see someone in a toupée today, in the 21st century, gives you the shock you might experience stumbling into the year 1934. A time when men with ill-fitting suits and brown fedoras would say "Hey, what's the big idea?" or "Aw, wise guy, huh?" There's something about a toupée that predates America's coming of age (via Vietnam and Watergate), a time when butch-waxed, hungry men with shirtsleeves, lean jaws, raw fists and pep held onto a vision of American opportunity even as their future dried up, even as they grew gristly and hard-bitten and old, even as the dust bowl and locusts swirled about them. Men who felt that if they could just throw some hair back under the fedora something might turn up.