Hairdresser, Part One

From "Hairdresser"

Let me tell you about my hairdresser. She’s phenomenal, amazing, knows just how much to trim and exactly where to take it from without butchering you or creating a weird facsimile of Tom Brown’s School Days. She also collects frogs. Ceramic frogs, rubber frogs, frog stickers, teapots with frogs hanging over the spout, grinning up at you with one lid closed. This makes it extremely easy to find a Christmas present for her, although in some years it is not always possible to locate just the right amphibian; frog trends tend to come and go. This fluid, rather unstable frog situation can present a sort of challenge, come the holidays. Her name by the way is Flossie, and she is extremely obese, which is a bit off putting at first I have to admit, until one realizes what a genius hair stylist she truly is. And besides, you don’t have to move around that much to snip someone’s crowning glory, but before I continue, let me tell you about the hair.

My hair probably deserves a paragraph although it could even be described as a circuitous story with lots of twists and turns. When I was relatively little I used to scream and whimper pitifully as my mother attempted to plow through that frizzy jungle of DNA like a tenacious and driven explorer hacking through the bush with a machete. Frizzy. How I hated the sound of that word in an era when blonde and bland and blah was beautiful. Straight, limpid locks, that was what I craved. But instead I was “blessed” with a thick and lumpy patch of mattress stuffing, a curly ball of twine. Later of course, when styles changed and people began resorting to expensive and time-consuming perms, I was thrilled to have “naturally curly hair;” it became my badge, a big head on a little girl. That was how I preferred to envision myself. . . .

For Judy

Flaunting the Rules- In Memoriam: Judy

1965

It is nighttime and we are crawling on our bellies through the grass in the warm darkness to the outhouse, convulsed with repressed laughter. Judy is also in her eighth month of pregnancy and we are not insensible to the absurdity of our strange, nocturnal trek, but we don’t want to get shot. There is a potentially dangerous situation brewing on this border kibbutz, and Joey has been summoned up for guard duty along with some of the other men. We’ve all been told to stay in our rooms, and Judy has come over so we can keep each other company, but suddenly she is seized with the urge to pee. There is no way out, and so we begin our trek. . . . The ground shakes with the silent heaves of our insane guffaws.

1961

My drama prof has handed out tickets to an off Broadway, highly acclaimed production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Diff’rent” and the class is assigned to attend. We are allowed to bring a friend and I bring Judy. As usual, we get there at the penultimate moment before the curtain rises and are relegated to seats in the first row; I nod to the teacher who is sitting placidly toward the back of the small theater. The tragedy gets underway in all its New England gloominess, moving toward a catastrophic moment in which all the characters are screaming wildly at each other. And it is just at that very climax of the playwright’s horrific vision of humankind that we notice a bug tenaciously attach itself to the lead actor’s pants- an item of clothing with which we are eye level- and start hiking slowly but steadily up the pants leg. You can hear a pin drop in the audience given all the clamor happening on stage when Judy and I once again become stricken with bouts of hilarity that we somehow have to conceal lest we be tarred and feathered by the gods of classical tragedy. We’re hysterical. Tears are rolling down our cheeks and we’re ready to bust. Finally, the curtain comes down, the applause is deafening, and our wild shrieks of unbridled laughter are swallowed up in the racket.

1960

Judy and I decide that our last term of high school will be a total waste, and so we enroll in a program called “co-op” that allows us to work and go to school on alternate weeks. We both wind up at Metropolitan Life Insurance on 23^rd in New York City, an uber corporate, life crushing sweat shop designed to turn its employees into zombie-like robotons. At precisely 11:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. a bell rings throughout the building, at which point everyone must stop what they are doing and take an enforced “break” for five minutes-  just enough time as it turns out for Judy to come racing into my office from next door so we can dive under my desk and roast marshmallows on paper clips, while the reform school matron of a supervisor sends arrows of pure hatred at us from across the room.

1958

My family has moved to a new neighborhood in the tenth grade. I am a bereft teenager, lonely and friendless in this unfamiliar setting, awash among a mass of other teenagers at a strange high school. In that era we still sit in those immovable, old fashioned, wooden, two-seaters from a Dickensean nineteenth century. Needless to say, I sit alone. Judy- though heretofore unknown to me but aware somehow that I live in her building- signals me from the back of the room, and then plops herself down in the empty seat next to me. And thus begins an entire semester in Bio of note passing, unprovoked giggling, and a mutual hatred for anything scientific, especially if it involves chlorination or frogs. Later that year we stay on the phone for hours, lamenting the fact that if we fail geometry, our lives will be ruined, ruined. As we are doing our several mile, all-weather, daily slog to school each day, not infrequent is the morning that we decide to play hooky and check out my old neighborhood; she wants to get to know my friends better and they have been immediately won over by her. When Judy decides to skip school on her own one day, she calls me at my job in the dean’s office so I can tear up her attendance card. An eavesdropping, vengeful switchboard operator along the lines of Lily’s Tomlin’s sniffling “Ernestine” turns us in, and parents are called to school. Miraculously, we survive.

2013

Judy calls from Indiana to gab. We get onto the subject of book clubs and discover that although we both love to read, neither of us has a penchant for reading required selections, or for attending structured meetings, even though we are forever promising everyone that we will, we will. In effect, we are still playing hooky and what of it- ya’ gonna do something about it??? Huh? Huh?