Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Pretty Is as Pretty Does


Why can’t Women get along? Maybe it’s the estrogen causing us to forget what we learned in Kindergarten. We don’t work well with others. We run with scissors. And we run each other off.
One day, I took my daughter to have her hair cut. It seems we’d just missed a dramatic, hair-pulling beauty shop breakup. Her favorite young stylist was freshly unemployed in the parking lot, trying to shove all her equipment into a two-seat sports car.  
So I popped open my trunk. My daughter went to hunt down some twine. All she could find was curling ribbon. Thank goodness there weren’t any Men around to see us using it for a tie-off. Certainly, packing and moving are high on their list of “Things Men do better than Women.”
Conversely, what would happen if Men ran Beauty Shops? Would they have troughs and spittoons? Would they have toilet paper? Every few months when the floors got crunchy, would they take a  leaf-blower to the fallen hair and peanut shells? These are questions with no clear answers.
I hear that beauty shops are beginning to offer services in private rooms. I hate to see it coming. Put up walls, and isolation sets in. If stylists are separated, they can’t share the latest trends. And it’ll put a muzzle on gossip, too. Nobody needs the bad kind, but good gossip lengthens and strengthens prayer chains.
If you’re wondering what happened to my daughter’s favorite young stylist, we patiently followed her from shop to shop. Finally she asked her Daddy to build her a beauty shop of her very own.
He went to Home Depot and bought enough stuff to raise a barn. In fact, that's what he built. Horrified, she sweetly redirected him on a few points, until she liked it just fine.
We like knowing she will never have to move again. And now, we'll know just where to find her.