As my 98-year-old client walked in front of me into Wallace's restaurant for a bit of barbecue, I couldn't help noticing her freshly-coiffed hair. It was beautiful and silver, springy and curled, ready for another week. Her dear daughter drives an hour and a half every Friday morning to bring her back here to the salon she's frequented for fourty years. We are listing her little brick ranch for sale, something that is difficult for her to face. Even though she is mercifully ensconced with her daughter (dare I hope to make it to 98 and my kids let me live with them?) she despairs of letting go of the last vestiges of independence. I marvel at the kindness of her daughter, who understands the significance of the deep, mysterious rite of womankind that binds us all -- the ritual of the beauty salon.
As a child, I remember being relegated to a corner of a busy shop while my Mama endured the shampooing, snipping, curling, ratting and spraying that was the required maintenance for a 1960s beehive hairdo. Millions of women went for their weekly refresh, carefully winding nets around their hair every night, sleeping in strange ways to keep from un-doing all that poofy goodness. My Grandma Betty had a standing appointment every Friday after work. When we would visit her in Illinois, I always thought it odd that she kept that appointment, no matter what. I was a kid and didn't yet understand what was so important about those hallowed tents of ozone-depleting fumes. Time went by and the beehives, though they have yet to disappear, became less sought-after and were replaced with the big hair and perms of the 1980s. The 90s and 2000s brought lots of highlights and blonding. Now we're morphing into every shade of the rainbow - blue, purple, pink, along with twenty-somethings having their hair silvered. Silver, really! I'm getting mature, just in time.
When I began having children, I started to understand the allure of the beauty salon. There's nothing quite like a fresh cut and highlights when your days are full of Cheerios and Fisher-Price music. Those dates were often accomplished with Daddy or Grandma watching the children and a half-day of getting there and back. It wasn't a spa by any stretch, with our Walmart-worthy-budget, but it might as well have been. Sometimes my sister and Mama and I would all head out together to our favorite stylist who lived out in the sticks of Roopville, with our dozen or more kids with us. The kids would play outside while we got permed, cut, and colored. It took hours but it was like a day at the Ritz for us Moms.
I went this week for my pre-vacation-hair appointment at Belize Salon in Villa Rica. (I always have two large fixes a year, one before the Christmas holidays, where my stylist puts lots of dark drama in with the blonde...and one before vacation where she turns up the California). As I was waiting, listening and watching all the theatrics that occur in any salon, I couldn't help but eavesdrop on numerous conversations. When a woman drops her head back to get shampooed, then submits to a rotating chair and scissors in someone else's hands, something puzzling happens and she becomes unhinged. Before I walk into a salon, I tell myself to try and shut up this time. Be quiet, be humble, be subtle. But the stylist is not a hairdresser any longer. She is my psychologist, confidante and mentor. She can say what she wants and I will believe it. But mostly she listens to the stream of consciousness that flows unhindered from my mouth. I can't seem to stop. I say things that I never mean to say. The time goes too fast, the job is done, I'm fresh and ready to go. As I pay her, I wonder if she ever reveals any of the codified information she gets from all the women that pass under her hand. She is the keeper of mysteries and the helper of Moms, Grandmamas and prom goers everywhere. I am very grateful for her.
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