Sunday Scribblings #68 Hair

I love my mother and grandparents absolutely (too bad that I don’t know what my ancestors are like on my father’s side) but of all the inherited traits that I could have received, I was unlucky enough to inherit the McGibbon/Spencer hair.

Both my grandmother and mother had/have the same thin, fine hair that I have. My sister (GRRRR) also has fine hair, but she has tons of it. She knows better than to complain about her tresses. The most that I will allow hearing from her is a complaint about her cowlicks. What I wouldn’t do to have enough hair to even have a cowlick!!! It’s outrageous!

My ex-sister-in-law was one of the good things in my now defunct marriage. She was a fabulous stylist and lived only 40 minutes away, so I was able to have her cut/perm/bleach/dye my hair as often as I liked, which was often because B was always telling me and anyone else that would listen that I had paper bag brown hair. (It’s also known in the tress trade as Ash — which simply means no real color. Take a look at Ash hair dye samples sometime in a salon!!) She also liked to say that because my hair was so (ahem) *challenging* (you may insert your own uncomplimentary adjective between the asterisks) that if she could do anything on my head, she could do it on anyone. Just call me a cosmetology crash test dummy!!

Okay, onward…..

I was so used to having B do my hair that I was really panicking when I realized that I would have to find another hairdresser. It seems that I should have had other things on my mind during the divorce, eh? Nonetheless — I knew how hard it was to find a good hairdresser so I started the search. And I think I was fair about it. I didn’t hop from here to there willy nilly — I gave each hairdresser at least six months to get their act together. It seemed that they all started out gangbusters, but by the 3rd or 4th haircut, they would get sloppy and spend more time talking than cutting correctly. I actually had one haircut where it was only cut on one side!! She whipped off the cape with a flourish and I asked her if she would like to finish cutting it before I paid her. No “A” for effort there, no sirree!!

The last straw came when yet another hairdresser mucked up my head. I had a job interview that was very important to me but I really needed a cut and foil. I had been going to this girl for awhile and while she wasn’t a stellar stylist, she wasn’t totally wretched. Well, until this day and then she was REALLY totally wretched.

The cut was average, but the foil came out – um-mm — stripy is the best was I can describe it. Stripy and orange. Can you spell panicked, boys and girls? Her brainiac suggestion to repair it was to cut it shorter, thereby cutting out the orange — this was her suggestion for fine, thin hair that was already 1 1/2″ long!!. My scalp was practically showing through already! I was beyond panicked and well on my way to terror-stricken. No way was she getting near my hair with scissors again!! And SHE had the nerve to get all offended when I wouldn’t go with her suggestion — not to mention how p.o.’d she was when I wouldn’t tip her.

(There really is a point to this whole story — stick with me here now.)

So I went home — in tears, and I don’t cry easily — pulled out the phone book and called the closest hairdresser to my home (I only had an hour to get my hair repaired and then get to my job interview — a baseball cap just doesn’t make a good first impression) and begged them to try to salvage my hair, which she did and quite nicely. (In case you’re wondering, she dyed the back of my hair back to my original color, thereby covering the orange.) That was five years ago. With all of the twists and turns of my hairdressing quest, and thanks to the brain surgeon that striped my hair orange, I found L, who in five years has never once given me a bad haircut or lousy foil. They say that all things happen for a reason and I guess Lady Luck was having a good laugh, watching me go through all of those other stylists until I found L.

Seems like an awfully long story for something so ordinary, doesn’t it? 😀