While perhaps not grand enough to be considered as the official turning-on of this year's Christmas lights, a small ceremony tomorrow evening will restore some brightness to many Dubliners' lives.
The neon sign in Dame Lane off South George's Street, which has asked "Why Go Bald?" for the past 38 years, recently underwent a full restoration and is now ready to flicker back into life. Once more the brilliantly-lit head of a man will alternately smile and frown according to whether or not he possesses any hair.
The sign was installed in 1961 as an advertisement for the adjacent - and still extant - Universal Hair and Scalp Clinic. The business had just been set up by Sydney Goldsmith who, according to his widow, Ann, "had a massive head of very nice wavy hair".
Mr Goldsmith's hair survived better than that on his advertisement which, rather like the heads of potential clientele, had long since lost its lustre and was thinning badly. Damaged glass tubes and faulty electric wiring meant that Mrs Goldsmith, facing a £5,000 quotation for repairing the sign, had decided to dispense with it altogether. However, this plan changed thanks to the intervention of two parties, 2FM's Gerry Ryan Show and the newly-formed Twentieth Century Trust. Ryan's listeners in August insisted on the sign's retention while the trust, which was set up by two Dublin women, Rachel O'Connor and Lisa Godson, undertook to see that the piece was fully restored.
According to Ms O'Connor, the trust's function is "to preserve icons of this century that are about to be thrown into the bin. Everyone thinks about the Georgian period but not about more recent stuff. What we want to do is get people to look at the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and more recently." Since the advertisement was switched off during the summer it has been undergoing thorough restoration courtesy of Taylor Signs, which first designed, manufactured and erected it. The company agreed to repair the neon piece without charge as a millennial project, and the results of its work can now be seen.
A small private party for those involved in the sign's salvation will be held inside the Universal Clinic tomorrow, before the public is invited to join the celebrations in Dame Lane at 6.30 p.m., when the sign will once more ask "Why Go Bald?"
Passers-by for whom the question is pertinent will probably wish they could find a solution to their problem as easily as the advertisement has.