A New “Do”

Last night, I joined a couple of friends for a New Year’s Eve Dinner. They wanted me to invite a gentleman friend to make it a foursome, but that proved problematic for me.

It’s not that I’m running away or hiding from “romance.” It’s just that I’m not desperately seeking it, and I don’t like disappointing gentlemen friends who might hope to elevate their level of friendship with me. Which means, inviting someone to spend New Year’s Eve with me feels as dicey as inviting a guy over for Valentine’s Day.

So, dinner would include only my friend, her husband, and me at a local restaurant. Just the same, with the approach of a new year and the desire to leave behind the dead weight of last year, I felt the need to make a bold move.

So, when I got out of the shower yesterday, I looked into the mirror and wacked off eight inches of my hair. Following a minute and a half of blow drying, about two minutes in my electric curlers, I fluffed out a new “do” for my evening out.

My friend was amazed when I told her I’d done it myself. She might have been horrified, but she managed to make it sound like a compliment. So, I decided to accept the compliment.

“When was the last time you had your hair done at a salon?” she queried.

“Oh, that must’ve been some time in 1985 or 86,” I offered. “Yes, there is a story, a trauma actually. Since my adulthood, that might have been only the second time that I spent time and money at a salon to have my hair styled,” I explained.

While my friends visit their salons every six weeks for a trim and shape up, I have a 3-year cycle. That’s about how often I wack it off somewhere near chin-length. After that, I give it a minor trim twice a year and see how much it grows until the next time I decide it is just too wimpy to wear it long. I like the versatility of longer hair. More important, I don’t like other people messing with my hair.

It is one thing to go out with your hair disheveled and looking just “OK” because you haven’t even really “tried” to make it look like something, but how many times have you looked at a woman and thought or SAID, “Oh my gosh! Did she actually PAY someone to make her look like that?!?”

Yep, you heard me. I cannot believe what some of these stylists do to their paying customers. The look might be innovative, but it doesn’t necessarily IMPROVE their look. I won’t go into detail, but I learned the hard way not to let a stylist do my hair if I don’t like what she’s done to her own. In my opinion, hair should be soft and shiny. It should attractively frame your face and it should be able to MOVE, not sit motionless on your head like a bizarrely shaped helmet.

But there had been a day when I was desperate for a change. One Saturday I left my two tiny girls with my husband and headed to a salon. The lady in whose chair I was placed had something that looked like a Grizzly Bear Bubble-do, a white person’s Afro. She asked me what I wanted to do with my extremely fine, straight blonde hair. I told her it had never held a curl, even a perm, very well, but if she could give it a soft curl that would be okay. I told her she could do almost anything to it except what she’d done to her own hair.

Maybe I shouldn’t have said that… because that’s exactly what I got. It was more than four years before I again entered a “beauty salon.”

But this time, I had three small children and was feeling particularly desperate, not about my hair, but about my life. It’s not odd for a woman to equate a new look with a fresh start in life. It’s not necessarily smart, but also not terribly odd.

I had no one to leave my children with, but I had a plan. Matthew was somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 ½ years old, which made Shannon and Erica around 8 and 6. I packed a “wonder-bag” for them, full of crayons, paper, coloring books, Legos, and snacks, and dragged them with me to the Regis Hair Salon at Timberlake Mall in Lynchburg.

This was the era of the great shopping malls with the neat features in them. About 50 yards for the Salon was a central junction with a large waterfall fountain pouring from a man-made mountain that was surrounded by a pond about a foot deep. An 18” stone wall encircled it to keep the water in and the people out.

I was going to treat myself to the works, a cut, a perm, and a style while my children entertained themselves in the salon lobby, in my line of sight. About the time the stylist started my perm the kids were already getting bored and Shannon asked me if they could walk down to sit and watch the fountain. A small band was playing there and they wanted to see it. I wasn’t totally comfortable with this, but she promised to hold onto Erica and Matthew and not allow anyone to wander off. They’d be right back in 5 or 10 minutes. Certainly, Shannon and Erica had been well-drilled in the rules of not talking to or going off with strangers. I mean they attended school and knew how to behave. After all, I trusted them to walk Matthew around the block at home.

A few minutes later, with my hair all in curlers and smelling of ammonia Shannon came wandering back in by herself. “Oh, Hi Mom! How’s it going?” she asked.

“Where are Erica and Matthew?” I demanded.

“Right behind me.”

They weren’t…. But a minute later Erica appeared, alone, looking sheepish.

“Where’s Matthew?” I squirmed under the hair dryer.

“Oh… He sorta… fell into the fountain,” she stammered.

“What?! Where is he NOW? How did he fall in?”

“Uhhhhh…. He was walking along the top of the wall… A man pulled him out.”

The stylists were starting to join me in my sudden panic. Was I going to jump out of the chair and run into the mall reeking of perm solution and looking like Frankenstein’s monster? Oh my gosh! What was I supposed to do? Where was my son? How could my daughters have LEFT him there? WHY had I TRUSTED them? Was I OUT OF MY MIND?

Then a man in his mid-thirties found his way into the salon, carrying my wet, slime-covered, shivering son. How? Who? What? I still have none of those answers. Today, I might have been arrested for allowing that to happen.

Bless those stylists. They grabbed him, pulled hot towels out of the dryer, wrapped him up, and put him in my lap. Everything after that is something of a blur to me.

And THAT was the LAST time I ever treated myself to a hair salon.