operator's waiting room at the beauty college. The experience for me could be summed up as an acid trip of
1964. I watched a bunch of old broads getting their rat'n tease, the quazi bleach blond bouffant poof in the
practice chairs. Oh, but it was the outcome of the last visit that made me know this would be our last.
Mom did not take to the color that was put on her hair. Her aspirations of apricot-blond didn't come out.
No, instead she had uniquely shaded colors of a vegetable garden that even the hair-coloring instructor couldn't
fix.
This became an opera of soap, namely shampoo, that took over the mom. It began leading her into the
bitch-to-bitch discussion of abhorrence of what she had to 'look in the mirror everyday, every moment, and
every hour."
Scary in a very authentic - 'somebody screwed up' sense of fact as there was no holding back the
mom's expressions of emotions about her current state of hair and style. The reaming took epic proportions as
the words flew from the mom over to the entire room of student hairdressers.
Out of steam, once settled down from the roar, the options of resolution reigned in two:
1. Strip and tip,
2. Cut up.
2. Cut up.
The latter was an acceptable cut up - very short. That, per the instructor, would take it back down to
allow the natural shade to 'show and grow'.
Bald eagle, easy to keep, a little gay, but I wasn't going to say that to my mom. Oh no!
Besides, I had no dog in this fight, and really didn't want to come back to the Beauty College again after
those words.
Before acting, mom and I conversed in the corner as if it were the war room. Both of us pointing out
that a return visit for any future strip and tip might mean an even slower death to her false thoughts of youth.
"Give 'em one last round, and let's buy a trim comb," was my positional advice.
On the drive home mom and I had a long discussion about the market's current hair products. Things
named, 'goo, gack, gummy stuff and bed head' that she could use to give the new shorter-short style some
shape and form.
Weeks later, my mom's hair was flat; she hadn't been using the products. Finally, my mom confessed
that she couldn't lift her arm up high enough to apply the sculpting goo to her own hair.
Ah, don't let your parents grow up to be cowgirls.
