Hair

S omeday in a future that seems to grow more distant by the day, there presumably will be a verdict. Maybe not until there's snow on the ground, it can seem as we wait and then wait some more, but if and when jurors decide the fate of Mayor Sheila Dixon, I'll look back and think: Ah, this was the turning point. After days of sending out notes that signaled turmoil among their ranks followed by ones indicating progress, the jurors fell silent on Tuesday. There were no questions about legal definitions, no temperature readings of their discussions, not even a really-need-a-smoke bit of comic relief.

Q. Thank you for printing the letter from the woman whose daughter has trichotillomania. I too pull my hair out compulsively and didn't even know there was a name for it. Having seen your explanation, I feel encouraged to discuss this with my doctor and my therapist. I was pleased to learn there is also medicine for the condition. A. Trichotillomania, repeatedly pulling out hair, is considered a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It might respond to cognitive-behavioral therapy, or it can be treated with prescription medication such as Anafranil, Luvox, Prozac or Zoloft.

There are some places one would expect to find matted hair. Shower drains and hairbrushes, certainly. Museum displays, certainly not. Sonya Clark, however, may be changing those expectations, at least for visitors of her Loose Strands: Tight Knots exhibition at the Walters Art Museum. Clark, an artist and the chairwoman of the Craft/Material Studies Department at Virginia Commonwealth University, is well-versed in working with many materials, among them human hair. In fact, the exhibit, which opens today, features sculptures made out of not only her own hair, which she wets and molds into the desired shape, but her mother's, too. Some may say her artistic materials are uncommon; she has the opposite opinion.

MY FRIEND Bill and I -- a couple of card-carrying, zTC 30-something liberal types -- were chatting on a downtown corner the other day.Offhandedly, Bill remarked that each of us could use a haircut. Which prompted him to ask me, "Have you noticed that more guys seem to be letting their hair get longer than usual? Since the war began?"And all this time I thought I was the only one picking up on this seeming phenomenon of more men with morePatrickErcolanohair since the start of the Persian Gulf war.OK, so I haven't put this observation to any rigorous tests.

Open the door of Imperatore Hair Design and prepare to be surprised. Located on the ground floor of the historic Ambassador Apartments in Baltimore's Tuscany-Canterbury neighborhood, the salon holds neither blue-haired ladies nor the overwhelming scent of perm solution. Instead what you'll find is a sleek, contemporary slip of a shop brimming with modern Italian furnishings and the promise of lots of personal attention. Owner Cindy Imperatore opened the roughly 400-square-foot salon in December and filled it with warm yellow- and orange-toned walls, honey-stained full-length mirrors and shapely little couches.

People would beg, borrow and steal for locks of long, luxurious hair. That much is clear from reports of an unusual burglary in North Baltimore. A thief broke into a Greenmount Avenue salon this month. He grabbed a radio, a VCR and some health care products. And a box of hair. Two days later, salon owner Salimata Camara couldn't believe what she saw outside a drugstore. There was a man trying to unload $700 worth of hair imported from China. "I knew it was my hair," Camara said. "Do you know how much he wanted to sell it for?

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine have identified the genetic control for hair patterning in mice. In humans, a similar gene might be responsible for the whorls and swirls that give some people effortless coiffures and others permanent cowlicks. Dr. Jeremy Nathans, a professor at the medical school, with Nini Guo and Charles Hawkins, bred mice that lacked the gene, called Frizzled6. On a normal mouse, most hair follicles point in the same direction so the hairs are parallel although, as with many mammals, mice have swirls on the chest.

At 35, Mike said goodbye to his marriage, his home and the hair on his back. The first two vanished quickly enough via divorce. The hair took a little more time.Three years have passed since the Davie, Fla., man started having his hair permanently removed by electrolysis."The back hair really bothered me to begin with," Mike says. "Then on top of that, people would say stuff about it. Like, at the beach once, some guy says to me, 'Hey, what's that growing on your back?' And one night I heard some girls talking about hair on a guy's back and how it really turned them off."

Alexis Ayala, 15, is the youngest in a hair-hanging sister act in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.When the Yak met Alexis earlier this fall, he asked her if hair-hanging hurts.Yup, it does, Alexis says. "But I don't think about the pain when I'm performing."What does she think about? "I concentrate on doing the tricks," she says.While Alexis and her two big sisters are hanging about 30 feet above the floor, they perform acrobatic movements and amazing spins. They even juggle fire.

Rosario Russell Caccamisi, a hair stylist and vintage auto enthusiast, died of a brain hemorrhage Friday at University of Maryland Medical Center. The Owings Mills resident was 65. Mr. Caccamisi was born in Cefalu, Italy, and immigrated with his family to Baltimore's Pimlico section in 1948. He was a graduate of Calvert Hall College High School and studied hair styling at what is now Avara's Academy of Hair Design and Technology. At his death, Mr. Caccamisi owned Hair by Rosario in the Pikesville Hilton and the Chartley Shopping Center in Reisterstown.