Another Beauty Shop – Another Day

It was time to get my hair done again. I would get a buzz cut, but my head is too little. I don’t want people to think I have a small brain, or “something’s wrong.” I have to buy my ball caps at Gap Kids. My wife’s head is about 2 inches bigger than mine. I think it’s because she takes in too much politics. Things get crowded in there because no matter how hard you think, you can’t figure it out. And then normally when a person would have steam coming out their ears, my wife just turns purple and has an outburst. She has a lovely head, don’t get me wrong. I think I just have a need to justify my own shortcomings. Friends recently told me I should try a short-spiky cut because it will always grow back if it wasn’t meant to be. But with my luck, the minute I get that done, I will have a callback for that audition I went on last week and they will say, “We didn’t realize your head was so little. Sorry.”

I got a perm the last time I had my hair done, and I looked like Christopher Atkins’ old, scary aunt. I hadn’t had a perm since college, and I just thought I would give it a go. I wanted a little wave in there. But apparently, even with all the new-fangled technology, no matter how many times in my life I try to get the savage look, I will always end up with a Jerry-Curl that relaxes into a frizz, that relaxes into a corkscrew, that finally just turns into a gigantuous mass of split-ends. So I got the perm cut off the other day. Men are lucky, they just go in, get their hair cut, spend $45 and they’re done. My hair takes 2 hours to do. I need to have highlights. If my hair (or the sky) goes dark, so does my personality. My hair hasn’t been it’s natural dishwater brown color for over twenty years. And along with two hours comes conversation. It’s unavoidable, unless I want to go to the expensive Ventura Blvd. salon, where they serve you wine, hand you a Vogue and go attend to the next client while their assistant is massaging your scalp. But it’s not in my budget right now so I have to play twenty questions with the local independent stylist. The first one is usually , “Are you married?”

“Laaaaaaa, uh, bwah yes,” I blabber, glancing down a my wedding ring.

“What does your husband do?”

“Uh, I meant no. No, I’m not married.” (Either way, I’m telling the truth, thanks to the Mormans.)

It would be nice if I were one of those people who doesn’t give a shit, and who doesn’t even keep any skeletons in their closet, let alone put duct tape over their jaw, handcuff their ulna to their pelvic bone and put a sign on their rib cage that says, “I’m just a Halloween ornament. There wasn’t room for me in the garage.”

It’s funny though, every time the words, “Actually I’m married to a woman,” have come out of my mouth, the stylist has been quite enthralled with the whole story. But you just never know. This person is in charge of my hair for the next 2 hours. Is she going to give me he Billie Jean King cut because she assumes that’s what I want. Is she going to call her brother Vinnie and give him my address so he can come throw a brick through my window? Or is she going to nervously rant about her college experiments? It happens.

Ninety percent of the time when I come out of the beauty shop, I look like Doris Day. Is that because they think if they give me a girlie cut, maybe it will change my ways? I don’t know! I don’t know what the reasoning is.

I always say,“Don’t bother styling it, I will do it when I get home.” But they can’t help getting out the brush and blow dryer and they just have to do something to it. How can you leave the beauty shop with a wet head and no styling? What planet are you from? What kind of woman are you!

A male one, that’s what!! Stop asking me hard questions! In the 7th grade, my friend Trudy got a short hair cut and it looked really cool. I went to the same place at the mall to get mine done, but I told the woman I didn’t want it too short. My friend got hers done here, and it looks great, but I don’t want mine that short. Well, I looked like a marine when she was done. I started crying. This was the 7th grade. But when I got home, I realized that was my favorite hair cut I’ve ever had in my whole life. And come to think of it, nobody ever said anything about my head being too small either. I think I should just try it. I work at home. I don’t have to go out of the house if I don’t want to. My band doesn’t have a gig for a couple months.

I’m going to take a poll. How many of my friends think my head is average size and I should not worry about how much hair is on it?

You know I just thought of something. I don’t think that cut would look good with my glasses. I might end up looking like Harry Potter’s old, scary blonde uncle.

Ew.

These things go through my head. However little it may be, a lot of things go through it.