Hair Bizness

We're already in the merry, merry month of May.  Good grief.  Why is time flying?  Why is every day about 3 hours long?  Not so long from now, I'll be an older old lady!  Yikes!  I need to do all the things I said I was going to do and haven't yet done.  Like clean out the attic.  And finish my undone projects.  And become a hairdresser.  Yep.  That was my ambition when I was about 10 years old.  I was going to become a hairdresser and own my shop and run my part of the world!  I remember visiting the hairdresser with my mom and grandmother, but back in the fifties, it was called the beauty shop.  My dad said he could never understand that because my grandmother always came back as the same ugly old blue haired lady who went into the shop.  He was speaking of his mother in law, who, in addition to having blue hair, also had a very sour personality.  Therefore, no beauty shop could have helped her.  I've always been soothed by watching others getting their beauty on and I know it began way back in those days.  I found it fascinating to watch these women sit down and have their hair tortured every which way - the meticulous way the hairdresser would take about an inch of hair and wrap it around a metal tube curler and continue this process until every inch of hair had been "tubed." Then all the tubed heads sitting under the hair dryer, gossiping with one another, or with another patron sitting in the hairdresser's chair having her head tubed, or with the owner of the shop.  And after the hair dried and the curlers came out, then the backcombing would commence.  Lordy!  My mother looked wild as her hair appeared to have been electrically shocked, but the hairdresser would take her comb and begin to comb down the wild parts and using the handle of the comb, would continue lifting the hair that laid too flat for her satisfaction.  I always wondered what would happen if some catastrophic event occurred and all the ladies in their various stages of "beauty" would have to run from the shop into the light of day.  After mom's hair had been teased and lifted multiple inches off her head, it would need to be sprayed into an impenetrable helmet in order to last the week.  Even with a can of hairspray sprayed on her head like bug spray, she would need to sleep on a satin pillowcase - just in case one of the hairs became wild and tried to escape.  I found all of this to be right up my alley.  This entire place was a woman's place - no man ever dared enter.  Therefore, the conversation could cover any topic and usually did.  As I used to do under the kitchen table, I would keep very quiet and pick up the gossip of my mother's world.  It was a wonderful place full of wonderful scents and I wanted to own all of it.  My hairdresser recently told me she never learned to give a permanent - schools no longer teach this particular hair style.  My mother still gets them.  She's ninety years old and thinks no head is nice unless it has a permanent.  Geez, I really miss the beauty shop and it's scents.  Enjoy my sketchbook page.  Pretend there is scent there.