GRANT PARK — This year, I was fully prepared to miss Lollapalooza for the first time, when at the very last minute, a surprise benefactor generously gifted me a coveted wristband to the sold-out music fest.
This wasn’t just any wristband.
The black strap on my left wrist granted “All Access” and the ability to see what life’s like behind the music at Lolla, a land of speedy food and beer lines where you can swing in a tree hammock, toss a game of bean bags, get a massage, sip fancy craft cocktails, nosh on Publican pork belly sandwiches and blood sausage tacos, get a haircut and a golf cart ride to any stage you want.
Of all the luxurious offerings, I was most in need of a haircut, so while AFI played, I headed to a backstage area where the Lolla folks had parked Floyd’s Barbershop’s new “Barber Bus.”
Briana McGary signed me up for a slot on the barber bus’s maiden voyage.
“This is the first big event for the Barber Bus, and it started out super crazy, but we’ve got it down pat now,” said McGary, who manages Floyd’s West Loop location.
“At our barbershops we normally listen to loud, crazy music, and having a stage right here is awesome. We’re cutting lots of hair.”
I slinked into barber Sergio Mendoza’s chair and asked, “Is this the weirdest place you’ve ever had to cut hair?”
“No way,” he said. “There was a time when I was on tour with my band in Alabama, and it was 115 degrees, 1,000 percent humidity, and I did three haircuts next to the tour van. Hot, sticky and bugs everywhere. Those were probably the worst hair cuts I’ve ever done.”
“So I’m taking my chances here, huh?” I said, letting loose a nervous laugh.
“No, this mobile barbershop is the best,” Mendoza said as he cut the curls off the back of my head with sheers.
We chatted about how good fortune had somehow landed us both in Lolla’s secret world of comfort and free stuff in the artist area behind the Bud Light stage.
His hair-cutting partner on the bus, Shelby Ruta, was in the middle of doing her own miracle work — turning a jean jacket-wearing hipster with the dirty blond hair of an unkempt poodle into a vaguely rocking hipster with a pompadour.
McGary said the biggest haircut trend over the three-day festival was for ladies to partially shave their heads to near the skin and leave longer hair on top.
“It’s definitely a growing trend. I rocked the pompadour until about a month ago when I said forget it, and shaved my head,” she said. “Women are realizing their beauty isn’t related to whether their hair is longer or shorter. I think that’s a pretty cool thing.”
As Mendoza and I scanned the crowd gathered around the Barber Bus we couldn’t help but notice that pretty much everyone we were surrounded by, ladies with shaved heads included, was good-looking, fashionable, or both, except for the guy with the sweaty head of curls currently in his chair.
“We’re going to fix that right now,” he said. “That’s what we do.”
And we had a good laugh about that.
Sergio took a straight razor to the back of my neck and slid his hand in a vibrating device that he used to massage my shoulders before sending me back out into the madness with folks less fortunate than ourselves to catch Lorde’s Lollapalooza debut.
As I stepped out of the shady paradise and into the late afternoon sun, the cool lake breeze flirted with the back of my freshly shaven neck … and the music started.
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