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Renewal is all on their heads
(by Barbara Christian - April 13, 2012)
WINDOW ON MAIN STREET, BY BARBARA CHRISTIAN
Renewal is all on their heads
Where do you go to experience acceptance and renewal?
If you answered "church," "synagogue," "mosque" or "ashram," you would be wrong -- at least on this test where the correct answer forms the basis of this week's thesis.
So where would you go when you need a warm spiritual embrace and feelings of beginning again? The correct answer is your friendly neighborhood beauty salon. You know it's true.
Walk in bedraggled and sad and emerge glossy and ebullient. That's what an hour or two in a happy place will do for a woman and some men, who slink sideways into these girlie places to treat their feminine side. Some don't slink at all; they cross the pink threshold as if they belong there.
For old school -- male or female -- this will never seem right. But there they are, all X and Y in double X chromosome territory heads up, confident and looking for an eyebrow wax, sideburn trim, a wash of color -- the little ego boosters they won't find in the manly man places.
Beauty shops (your mother's term) are the places where you can let your hair down, literally and figuratively. They are the fairy-tale realm where anything is possible. Perhaps you need a little chair-side psychoanalysis, a family problem solved or maybe just new hair color or style.
One that will make you look like Michelle Williams, you will say. Hand your hair stylist a photo of a 22-year-old super model with long locks, and she or he will do their best to give you that look. That is what they do. A good beauty salon professional is a miracle worker, life coach and your best friend for an hour or two once a month.
My longtime hair-styling pro, Angela, is always ready to work the impossible dream on my head. We have done highlights and blond "chunks" in the futile attempt to hide my advancing gray. When we let it return to its natural state, Ange whispered in my ear, "It's beautiful, and it's all you, baby," even though she knew she would lose money on the expensive color treatments.
Together, Ange and I have tried mid, short, shorter and shortest cuts, and, at the moment, we are mimicking Ellen DeGeneres' shag, recreated from a picture of the star I sheepishly slipped her a couple of cuts ago.
Working with a hair stylist is a partnership which reveals itself with a hug we give each other at the end of our monthly meeting. Like I said, it's all about warmth and acceptance.
But there are women who never seek the advice and consent or feel-good experience of the client-stylist relationship. Perhaps they have had a bad time in the chair of a less-than-honest and thoughtless hairdresser. Like every profession, there are bad apples, and when you get one, he or she is more worst enemy than best friend.
Long ago, the hairdresser I patronized spent our time together on the phone in usually agitated conversations with his bookie or stockbroker. This he did with the telephone tucked between chin and shoulder while wielding scissors a hair's breadth from my ears.
When not on the phone, he liked to argue politics. We rarely agreed. After some years, I came to understand, on those occasions when we disagreed, I left his chair with oddly configured bangs.
Eventually, I stopped going back. Breaking up is hard to do with your partner in hair, and I understand he still asks about me.
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