THE MOST IMPORTANT PART ABOUT SHAVING YOUR HEAD -- or having your head shaved, for that matter -- is that you don't have a big ball of fat hanging from the back where your head joins your neck. This is information that has been passed on to me since I had my head shaved last week. Shaved it myself, actually, after having it buzz cut. The barber who buzzed me told me she thought I had a good head for shaving, to which my wife responded curtly, "So what do you think she tells everyone else?"

I never even thought of that. Why would a female hair cutter in a combination tatoo parlor/mohawk barber shop off Newport Ave. in Ocean Beach, Cali., volunteer that I had a great head for shaving if it weren't true? Ocean Beach is a post-hippie biker-friendly neighborhood in the city of San Diego -- think of South Street by the Pacific instead of the Delaware. In fact the O.B. hair cuttery has the same name as the one I infrequent on South Street, The Chop Shop.

My buzz cutter never used the words gnarly, naggly, sloped, misshapen or lumpy. She did mention bumps, which she said my head didn't have, which I took as a good thing. She never mentioned a thick fat neck, which creases like a backwards smile everytime you lift your shaved or naturally bald fat neck head.

I don't have that either. But I can't stop looking for them now that I've been told. .

I was standing in line at the 30th Street Post Office Saturday afternoon when I saw a three-creaser from behind. [ Dude! Wear a hat! If you could make that face in a mirror, you'd never make it again.] I was wearing a Dirty Franks baseball cap at the time. I had just had my comeuppance.

On Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia I walked into a store where I was well known and doffed my cap to a group of ladies with a hearty, "So whadaya think?!" I did a left to right, hot-CHA-cha-cha, Jimmy Durante profile. This apalled-looking lady to my left stared at my head. A lady to my right thought something in Spanish, which she did not speak aloud at first. Soon I translated both reactions. "Cabeza blanca!" Which is to say a well-tanned California face does not work with a pale white Philadelphia scalp that hasn't seen direct sunlight since infancy.

There I was thinking my newly bald head made me look like Vin Diesel and I return home to discover I more closely resemble Michael Smerconish.