Unless you have spent your life living pre-4000 BC, before the mirror was invented, you may have noticed that you have hair growing out of your head. Life in the Boomer Lane has noticed this since she was a toddler and her mother tried to comb her demented hair. Even bracing her foot against LBL's tiny shoulder and yanking as hard as she could, Beloved Mom was unable to get LBL's hair to look like anything other than Rasputin's beard.
The years since have been filled with as many hair procedures as follicles on her head, in a series of unsuccessful attempts to make her hair more humanlike. Each procedure and each stylist was eventually abandoned.
One day, LBL was in a large, crowded department store, when two of her former hair stylists (who had each owned their own salons and had recently joined forces in one salon), stopped her and loudly announced that her hair looked like shit. They did this while one stood behind her and the other stood in front of her, each pulling her hair in even more directions than it had ever discovered on its own. A crowd formed around them and gawked, assuming this was a reality show about hair, in which people with bad hair were ambushed in public places, taken to New York, and transformed. But when the salon owners eventually moved on, the disappointed crowd disbursed.
Fairly recently, LBL was on the usual hunt for the perfect hair stylist when she saw one online that bleated "Voted the #1 Salon in (LBL's hometown)!" What followed were glowing endorsements about the prowess of the salon's owner. She dialed the number as fast as she could and made an appointment with the owner. When the Big Day arrived, LBL strolled into the salon, mentally prepared to have her life finally make sense. Said owner looked up from the women whose head he was slathering with a blue substance, and said, "Renee! I haven't seen you in a while! Glad you are back!" This was not the best way to start. LBL may not be the sharpest tack in the tool box, but she realized two things immediately:
1. She must have been to this salon before.
2. If she hadn't returned, it was, most likely, for a good reason.
An hour and a half later, she knew exactly why.
Disasters occur even when she has hairdressers she likes. She referred one hair stylist to a friend, and when her friend went there and loved the cut and color he did, said hairdresser promptly learned that his mom was quite ill, took a long leave of absence and eventually quit the salon altogether.
She referred her current hair stylist to another friend, who went with the highest hopes. They discussed at length how my friend wanted to look and the stylist said, "So you want funky, right?" LBL's friend enthusiastically agreed. The snipping started and went on for some time. When finished, the stylist beamed and announced "Farrah Fawcett!" As Farah Fawcett was, at the time, still dead, LBL's friend thought it unlikely that the stylist was announcing that Ms Fawcett had just entered the salon. The stylist handed LBL's friend a mirror and confirmed her worst nightmare. While hoping she would look like the cover of a magazine, she hadn't anticipated that it would be a magazine from the 1980s.
LBL will no longer refer friends to hair stylists.
LBL has now figured out what the secret is to perfect hair every day, and it is neither wigs, large hats, nor burkas. She now wears her workout clothes at all times, and when she sees people she knows, she says, "Oh please excuse my hair. I spend most of my day in the gym and don't wash my hair until I get home." People are so stunned that they can only process the "most of my day at the gym" part. For more formal occasions, she does dress up, but quickly says, "Please excuse my hair. As I spend most of my day at the gym, I only had time for a shower, before getting dressed to go out." Same reaction from people.
This technique is pretty flawless, unless, as the months have gone by, people are starting to wonder why, hair aside, the rest of LBL doesn't look like she has seen the inside of a gym in a long time. She is working on this pesky issue now, and will share her thoughts with readers in a subsequent post.
Earlier on Huff/Post50:
