Best Hair on the Air

When Benno Schmidt reports for NBC 6 News, whether it's live coverage of "Brazen Bandits" robbing a convenience store or yet another sad story about an elderly person found living ankle-deep in animal poo, his hair looks fabulous. Almost escaping the frame of his closeup, Benno's locks are like Clark Kent's: black and lustrous, with a sensible dollop of dippity-do (our guess is Aveda's Defy). How he achieves the particular shellac that holds his three-inch-tall Wall of Bangs in place despite the intense heat of TV lights is inspiring. From Texas originally? Naw, the East Coast. He graduated from Wesleyan University (with a New Times writer, to whom he once exclaimed, "Can you believe I'm on TV giving the news, man?") and sharpened his skills at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. No beauty-school dropout, Benno gets high marks for his big hair.