When a Southern Woman Rambles... by L. Avery Brown (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

And being that I was only 17, I must admit I loved the attention I got even though I played it cool and nonchalantly replied to their compliments with, “Thanks. But it didn’t turn out exactly like we wanted so I’m gonna get it redone in a couple of weeks. Totally free.  And the lady who did it says my hair will look absolutely faaaaabulous. Or maybe even better when she’s done.”

To this my friends all nodded with (genuine) excitement as they scrunched my hair some more and said, “That is so totally awesome!”

But the real test of my new do’s appeal rested in the opinion of my boyfriend (who later became my husband). I’d worried all weekend about whether or not he would like it. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he saw me that Monday morning. It wasn’t so much shock and disappointment as it was confusion. I asked him how he liked it and he replied, “It’s…(hesitation – which, after 20 years of marriage I have learned is his way of processing thousands of possible responses that don’t sound dreadful) - different.”

This was immediately followed by, “But if you like it that’s all that matters. But it’ll take some getting used to because I liked it the way it was. But it’s okay…I guess. Yeah, it’s alright.”

*Note to self: 

3 'Buts' in one response is never a good sign.

*To Do List: 

Bake some brownies for him and tell him thank you for consciously being kind when he could’ve been so intentionally cruel way back then!

Of course, when I saw that he wasn’t 100% thrilled with my coiffure-transformation I explained to him about the do-over that was planned for the following fortnight and told him that I was promised that when Shelley was done my hair was going to be absolutely faaaaabulous. And he simply smiled; what a smart man. 

For the next two weeks I cleaned, conditioned, and scrunched-n-dried my hair believing deep inside that I was going to wind up looking like someone who’d stepped out of the pages of Seventeen Magazine. And with my sister’s wedding coming up just a couple of weeks later, I envisioned that years down the road when people glanced through her wedding album they’d all point to the petite girl at her side and go, ‘Wow! I wish my hair looked that good.'

So, when the day finally came and I drove myself and my mother to the salon I knew without a doubt that when I walked out of there my world was going to be somehow brighter and lighter.

But when I checked in and told the receptionist who I was and with whom my appointment rested I got a little concerned because as she ran the eraser tip of her pencil down the appointments list and got to my name I saw that they’d blocked out a 3 hour time slot and put 2 big stars followed by an exclamation point.

*Note to self:

In a salon appointment book (**!) means 1 of 2 things –
● The client is already absolutely faaaaabulous and must be treated like a demigoddess - OR-
● Something bad had happened.  Something very, very bad! 
(Incidentally, I do not own a toga and my father’s name is neither Zeus nor Odin.)  

The receptionist looked up at me, smiled and said, “Oh, it’s you. Let me just go get Janice.”

*Addendum to Last Note to Self: 

(**!) is also beautician’s code for ‘Oh, Sweet Jesus in a Cradle!  Time to call in the big guns!’

Janice, the manager, was also a friend of my mother and my mother had been a client of Janice’s for years. Now I might have been only 16 but even I knew that when the manager is called in before the appointment ever takes place it cannot be a good thing. That’s when I looked around and saw all the mirrors in the salon. Mirrors here, mirrors there, mirrors everywhere. And I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

When Janice walked over to greet me, she wore an expression of woeful regret and her arms were extended – ready to give me a hug. *GULP* I thought, Maybe she’s just overcome with joy at seeing me? 

The first words out of her mouth were, ‘Oh, Baby Girl, don’t you worry. Janice is going to fix this mess and you’ll look just fine.’ 

*DOUBLE GULP!* Mess? I’ll look fine? Only fine! Nooooooo! I'm supposed to be Absolutely Faaaaabulous!

My heart sank and my Seventeen Magazine cover girl dreams flew away from me because apparently, my hair was as far from absolutely faaaaabulous as I was to the moon. And I’ll never forget looking at my mother with her lips spread thin across her teeth…it was Salad Bowl Head all over again! I walked sullenly to Janice’s booth with its multiple licenses, awards, and photos of happy customers and she set about fixing the damage that Shelley, who we found out had only been licensed for six months, had done to my hair. And I do not think it coincidence that I saw neither hide nor hair of Shelley in the salon that day…or any of the many times I went there in the years following.

Janice slathered my head with some strange thick, herbal scented goop after which I had to wear a little plastic shower cap and was placed beneath a warm dryer hood for 30 minutes so the ‘remedy’ could leach its way deep  into my chemical-fried hair. When I was done with part one of my redo, Janice dried my hair just a bit and started clipping away as much of the frayed mess as she could without taking off too much of the length…sadly she ended up taking off about five inches.

But trimming away the frizz didn’t do enough to make my hair look ‘fine’.  No.  Because once I was frizz-free, I looked as if I was a poorly groomed poodle with poof from my ears down and I had not one ounce of bounce on my crown. Janice told me that if I wanted her to, she could reperm my hair using something not nearly as harsh and which wouldn’t last but a couple of months. I glanced around in the myriad of mirrors and thought I’d cry if I had to walk out there looking like Fifi, the Wonder Dog. So, I weepily told her to do it.

That was the point where I sort of tuned out everything around me. All I know is that when Janice was done my hair looked better than ‘just fine’…in fact it was fairly close to fabulous albeit my hair wound up about 8 inches shorter. (Thank the Lord my hair was very long pre-perm #1.) The frizzies and wicked split ends were finally gone and in their place was a head of fairly wavy looking hair that did not look stylishly wet and was not in the slightest bit crunchy because Janice had barely moussed it and only very lightly scrunched it.

Thankfully, the crisis I didn’t know was really a crisis was resolved in time for my sister’s wedding. Because if had I known just how bad it was, you’d better believe I'd never have gone around my school showing off my deep-fried, mousse coated, ‘looks like I stuck my finger in a light socket’ hair. Interestingly enough, I never saw the pictures from my sister’s wedding so I’ll never know how my nearly absolutelyfaaaaabulous hair looked in them.

The moral of this Tragic Tale of Beauty: 

Be wary of beauticians who promise

they’ll make you look absolutely faaaaabulous 
after they’ve already screwed up.

I am a strong proponent of sunscreen.  And as such I tend to always carry some sort of solar blocking skin solution with me in my handbag.  In fact, right now I know that somewhere in the vastness of the black hole that is my pocketbook, there is a tube of Blistex spearmint flavored SPF 15 lip balm as well as a handy dandy twist-to-use cylinder of waterproof Banana Boat sunscreen with an SPF of 50 for those times when I feel the urge to smooth on a micro-thin shield between my pale, fragile human skin and the awesome rays of the giant ball of burning hydrogen called the sun that has temperatures ranging anywhere from 27 million degrees Fahrenheit at its core to a balmy 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface. 

Likewise, there are several bottles of ever so convenient spray-on sunscreens in my car that can be called upon if ever I should feel the pressing need for a quick coat of dermal protection.  These spray-on wonders vary from one with an 8 SPF and has a lovely aromatic coconut ‘takes you to the beach’ scent to one that has an SPF of 75 with a ‘not so lovely so it must be working’ sort odor.  And all of them have some kind of concoction that adheres to human skin creating a thin waterproof barrier that not only leaves one’s skin feeling a bit tight but can also eat through fingernail polish if not removed quickly.  But the loss of a $45 manicure is a small price to pay in the grand scheme of life.  Decisions, decisions – which one to choose? 

Now, if you’re like me, you don’t know the mathematical/chemical formula used to come up with the bingo board of SPF ratings.  Is a non-waterproof 8 bad?  If so, does using a waterproof sunscreen with an SPF of 95 mean I could have a midday picnic sitting on solar panels out in the Mojave Desert and not worry?  I suppose it doesn’t really matter because what I do know is that it all comes down to how quickly your skin type burns.  Furthermore, I know that if I use SPF 10, I’m supposed to have about 2 hours’ worth of protection...but I’m too chicken to see if it’s true, so I reapply every 30 minutes.

I’m not against the sun.  Heaven’s no.  I love it.  It makes me happy.  So maybe I’m a little overzealous when it comes to the whole skin protection thing but I’d rather be safe and as pale as the White Sands National Monument than wrinkled and leathery or worse yet, dead all because I simply had to look sun kissed.  And I think you’ll agree that dead is a look that doesn’t look good on anyone.

Of course, some people like to tempt fate by not using anything at all to protect themselves.  Maybe they’re just uninforme or they don’t care.  And I can’t spend my time worrying about them.  Granted, I’d hate to see them keel over from skin cancer but then again, when there’s information out the wazoo that tells us over and over again about how important sunscreen is and they still opt to not use it – well, their stupidity simply reiterates the concept of ‘Natural Selection’. 

What gets me – even more than the ‘I’m invincible!  I like going au naturel’ dingbats are those people who go through all the motions of putting on an already low rated SPF sunscreen only to immediately slather oil over their bodies with the misguided belief that the sunscreen will somehow mix with the greasy stuff and magically cancel out the fact that they’ve turned their bodies into giant UVA and UVB ray collecting shimmery blobs