"Why don't you get a haircut? You look like a chrysanthemum." (P.G. Wodehouse)

*

I kind of love the lady who cuts my hair.  She's completely nuts, to start with, but in such a cute way that I want to agree with her ridiculous statements and musings.  Last time it was mostly wonderings about why her dog cannot talk even though he seems to understand everything she says.  Sometimes it is about celebrities, about whom she talks affectionately as if they were her close friends.  And she wears high heels, four inches I think, stilettos.  Stiletto heels are mystifying enough in their natural environment (bars), but inside one's own home they are incomprehensible.

Oh yeah, I get my hair cut at her house.  That part is where I am the strange one.  I seek people who can cut my hair in their own homes ~ but only because there are no professionals that I know of who will come and do it in mine.

I do not like haircutting places.  They give me the creeps.  Getting a haircut is a vulnerable experience.  (No wonder children scream... the cold wet hair, the stranger waving sharp scissors near their ears, the bright lights, the weird smells.)  And I feel traumatized by the intimacy of being up close and personal with someone I hardly know while trusting that person not to cut off my ear.  And the view.  I hate seeing other people all vulnerable and wet-headed, chicken necks exposed to the fluorescent lights, jars of barbicide everywhere.

I have always sought those weird people who cut hair in their living rooms, so the intimacy is heightened in that the experience becomes one-on-one but lessened in that I no longer share it with a dozen strangers flanking me on all three sides not protected by the mirror.

And somehow the things that would be intolerable at a salon are funny in this environment.  Like the talk about why dogs don't talk.  And she frequently breaks to give her dog a treat while she is cutting my hair.  It's delightful and strange.  Less important, but also pleasant, is the fact that this woman does a better job cutting my hair than anyone else does.  She knows how to cut in a way that I can be as neglectful as I want and it still seems fine.


*