A Fashion Don’t Visits the Frou-frou Salon

Last night I tried a new hair place at a friend’s recommendation. It was finally time to direct some attention towards my four-and-a-half inch roots. Since bad hair experiences are part of my genetic make-up, it was, of course, a barrel of monkeys.

I knew I was going to enjoy messing with their demographic as soon as I walked in and saw a black leather couch with animal print pillows and a vase of orchids on an otherwise empty table the size of my bathroom. I was wearing my still-wet hair in a giant plastic clip (hey, elastic bands cause breakage) and a sex-ay oversized zip-up cardigan with drooping kangaroo pockets and a giant Frodo hood. Normally said cardigan never leaves the office, but I was ill-prepared for the 20-degree temperature drop and pouring rain that started in the late afternoon.

Of course, each tween behind the counter had matching glossy black hair with perfectly sideswept bangs and bejeweled 90-dollar platform flip-flops. When I approached the desk to register, I could tell Madyson/Jenifyr/Raquel was trying not to bend backwards in order to avoid the little untrendy gremlins that were leaping off me in giant floods of uncool.

After enduring the glares of an endless parade of 60-going-on-39 women, and trying not to cackle at the tiny man who came in a van to replace the flower arrangements with something even more stark and dewy, I was finally retrieved by the fabulous Laura for my hair “consultation”. I have never understood the point of these. It’s hair. It grows out of my scalp. Cut some of it off. The amount between the two fingers I’m holding up will be fine.

First order of business was getting me back to my natural color. My long-past-summer highlights were dying a merciless death. I had though both a snap-up jacket and a smock was overkill, until I saw that she dipped the brush in the bowl of coloring goo as if she were playing Supermarket Sweep. The Battle of Normandy may have involved less clean-up.

Next she trimmed an uneventful inch off the ends, all the while reassuring me that she was only cutting off *this much*. Anyone with long hair recognizes that tone of voice. It’s the one hairdressers use if they aren’t sure whether you’re one of the Crazy Long Hairs. These are the people with ass-length hair, usually trailing to stringy bits in the last six inches, who view a miscalculation in the permissible cutting length as a travesty akin to having their spleen torn out and eaten with sautéed onions. Their hair is their religious identity. It makes them romantic and feminine, and possibly English.

There’s really no way to combat this fear, other than with time. You can’t come out and say “Look, if you slip a bit, I’m not going to eat your tongue. I’m not one of *them*.”

After that bracing experience, Laura said she wanted to try to coax the curl out of my hair and style it with a diffuser. I figured I’d get Laid-Back Customer points for letting her play around, and a style I hated could easily be washed out. No big deal. I tried to explain that my hair is neither curly nor straight, but existing in some alternate rat nesting dimension. She insisted she wanted to try, and she had that jaw thrust going that kids get when they want to dress themselves and end up wearing a raincoat with a tutu and bunny slippers.

So, she pulled out a diffuser larger than my left arm. It looked like a piece of a space shuttle. Then she started winding up my hair and draping in inside this plastic funnel and pressing it against my head. I spent the entire ten minutes watching my mouth jerk sideways with a barely suppressed cackle. I could see the hair rising as it dried into a nuclear mushroom of hell, but she just furrowed her brow and kept at it. It’s a strange feeling, trying not to laugh at someone who’s busily making you look like the love child of Amy Lee and Debbie Gibson.

When she was done, I looked like I should have run to the nearest mall promenade and belted out “Could’ve Been”. It wasn’t curly. It wasn’t straight. It wasn’t even crimped. It was wound around itself in ropes of self-hatred. It looked like I’d spent the day testing the wind resistance of a new Nascar prototype.

Laura had a confused snarl on her face, as if she were wondering if she could send my hair to bed with no dinner or television. I was enjoying the fact that I was now an even more archaic fashion don’t than when I’d entered the building, no longer at my own incompetent hands. She sprayed my head with enough spritz to cement an elephant to a flagpole. Apparently this was a style we wanted to keep. I was starting to be worried that I was being submitted to a style museum, or perhaps a VH1 flashback episode. The spritz smelled like candy necklaces and teen angst.

Then she informed me that I shouldn’t wash my hair until Thursday night due to the dye. Hmmm. This was a snafu I had not foreseen. It seems this hairdo and I have 48 hours to get to know each other. So, today I am wearing the nasty plastic clip again. It’s holding back the flood with all the success of a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

Also, after sleeping next to my lollipop head last night, my husband woke up and tried to sneak four Advil without me noticing. No way, buster. I have to smell this Willy Wonka nightmare all day long, you can suffer a little in commiseration.

Greenbunny