Trip to the Salon(?)

Being that I have time on my hands and don't have to squeeze in such things as hair cuts anymore, I decided to pay a visit to LaBelle at Great Clips this afternoon even though it had been only two months. After giving my phone number as that seems to be the only way a customer can be recognized, I sat in a molded plastic chair to wait for her and started to leaf through a slick, heavy fashion magazine filled with photos of unfed and unhappy young women in unnatural positions. Not that I haven't developed an appreciation of fashion. Thanks to Meryl Streep's character in The Devil wears Prada she taught me that the color of the tee shirt I am wearing today is a reflection of the choices that the mentally stressed design community made years earlier, and I should thank them immensely.

As I waited, the four haircutters jokingly bantered back and forth while they were snipping away at male and female heads, talking trash about people they knew and customers who may have asked for special favors. I kept my nose in Elle but couldn't help but listen. We don't call it ebonics, but I doubt that anyone but a Southerner could have followed their conversation.

LaBelle finally called me to have a seat in her chair, and she wet and combed my baby fine hair then clipped it nicely. When I started going there a couple of years ago, I realized that I didn't need someone with hair like mine to know how to do it right. She said that it is easy to cut white people's hair. It makes sense.

Then I paid the ten bucks and walked to my car. As I was backing out, she ran up. She meant to ask me something while I was in there. Some abdominal discomfort. What could it be? I asked part of the litany of questions that I was glad I could still remember, and we came up with a possible answer. She had been kind enough to let me take her picture once. She is an exotically beautiful girl who doesn't seem to know it, and I had told her I had a blog and would like to put her picture on it. I had to use my cell phone to do it. The quality was not blogworthy so it never hit the big time.

Some women go to the same hairdresser for years and establish close relationships with them. I tried, but I couldn't get cutting consistency with hairdresser consistency. Now I wonder...how hard could it have been! Now snip, snip and that's it, plus some cheap entertainment.