Dotty Parker

pitching pine

I was making a wreath tonight out of pine boughs from the yard. I made what I think is a pretty wreath. (I also made a mess, but hey, that can be fixed. I've heard that, anyway.)

By the time the wreath was ready to be decorated and the decorations were out, my hands were pretty well covered in pine sap. I look like I've been playing in coal.

It's intriguing that I'm fine with having sticky, piney hands. Why? I got my hair cut today. Getting my hair cut is such an ordeal for me that I do it three or four times a year. I'm trying to get better. (Go to Nancy at Scizzor Wizards. She rocks.) Nancy keeps me calm. She inspires confidence in her skills and decisions, too.

She suggested that I try a new shampoo since it's winter and split ends (omigod!) will start to be more prevalent. She also suggested a HAIR PRODUCT.

I bought the product. I'm now afraid that my hair will be crunchy like it was in plays in high school when they helmeted me with AquaNet.

Ah, but anyway.

Pine pitch. Do you think if I put that in my hair I'd be more comfortable since I know what it would do? I totally need to get over this. Apparently fifteen years isn't long enough.

Get over what? I could tell the real story, but it's boring. So maybe a more interesting one would be better...hmm.

Here we go! Just an FYI to anyone who might have a smart/dorky kid in the vicinity, gym class sucks. (That's true, by the way.) There were all kinds of kids who were not aware of my delicate, princess-like nature. Even in high school, there was a bit of this kind of anger.

One woman in my gym class was in the cosmetology program. The girls in that program were the ones who had bangs that scraped the doorframes when they walked through. They smoked on the corner. They had leather jackets with puffy shoulders and then tapering to the waist, often with long, narrow triangular accents on each side.

This woman was, for reasons unknown to me, my mortal enemy. We'd play mat ball and I'd have to go to the nurse's office and then the hospital for treatment of a concussion. She hit me so hard with a dodgeball that one of my eyes popped out. Thank goodness Dr.Dad was there to put it back in. He said, in his laconic way, "Good thing they didn't pop the globe. Use some ophthalmic antibiotic."

At any rate, I went to get my hair cut the next year, after she'd graduated. I just wandered into one of those haircutting places in the mall. I sat down in the indicated plastic chair, and it was her.

Her!

She used water that was too hot, nearly separating my skin from my skull. She cut my hair badly. I looked like my hair had been terraced and that the left-over products she'd gunked into my hair was the crop of the season.

I swear she would have burned me with a curling iron, but I was already weeping and sliding down onto the hair covered floor begging her to have mercy on my poor head.

She stopped. The other hairdressers looked at me with venom. One of them tripped me on the way out. My eye would have fallen out, but I had my hand over it. That's where some of the hair product had already fallen into my eye.

I gave her a generous tip and ran as fast as I could to Burger King. People laughed at me as I ran through the mall. Little did I know that one of the hair products she put in my hair was one like Nair--it dissolves hair. By the time I figured it out and washed it out in the bathroom, I had tiger stripes of weak hair. I begged a little girl to bring me a crown from the front of the restaurant.

She told her mother that I accosted her in the bathroom. I was afraid that her mother was going to be the hair stylist, but it was just a semi-weird lady who offered me a hairnet, too.

I left the mall that day knowing that I never wanted to get my hair cut again. And that I wanted to slash that stylist's tires.

So that's a way better story than the real one.

Posted by dotty at December 9, 2004 10:53 PM