I got a haircut today

I got a haircut today.

Please, no more applause.

This was a bit of a milestone for me, not just because I needed one but also because I took the plunge and finally went to a new hair dresser. In a salon. Like, there were actually plants, decent music and faux-hardwood floors there. I'm used to going to one of those in-and-out ten-dollar jobbies.

I am generally loyal to a hair dresser. I find that they are people with whom it's worth it to build a long-standing professional relationship. Even in the in-and-out ten dollar jobbies I always saw the same stylist. In fact, there was a period when I went to the same stylist for almost ten years. I saw her through two husbands, three lesbian lovers and yet another husband.

Did I mention she also eventually found Jesus?

Yes, she had three husbands, three lesbian lovers and she found Jesus. Though it wasn't necessarily in that order. As I recall Jesus came after the lesbians and before the third husband.

Oh my God, did I just say that? That sounds like a line from a racy South American romance novel doesn't it? I will surely burn in tuna for that.

I kept going to her through all that.

That is until one day . . .

(insert blurring image of present day and slowly steadying wavy image of past event)

(Oh yeh, and the sound of someone strumming on a harp)

When I began chemotherapy a few years ago, I knew my hair was likely to fall out. That's a given that most people know about chemotherapy. Your hair falls out. What many don't realize though is that you don't just wake up one morning bald. Hair loss is a gradual process that starts with a few strands on your pillow, then more in the shower, and after several more rounds of intravenous Drain-O and weedkiller your hair becomes patchy and gross and makes you look like the cancer kid that you are.

Being the cancer cult resistor that I am, I didn't want to let my hair get to the point where it looked like I was trying to elicit sympathy from others, so one day I went to my stylist and told her it was time. She knew about my diagnosis so it was no surprise to her. She even had another customer with the same form of cancer.

Testicular for those not already in the know.

Anyway, she cut and buzzed and cut and buzzed and I watched as clumps of hair fell to the floor. I know it sounds sad but choosing baldness before it chose me was actually quite liberating. The only problem was that even the closest setting on a pair of clippers will leave a minimal amount of hair at each follicle, and I didn't want to leave a trail of mousy brown hair dust in my wake.

You never know when that Grissom and his team are going to be trailing along after you with forceps and a plastic baggie. Can't you just see that muppety assistant of his looking at hair under a microscope saying, "we ran tests on it, and it showed traces of bleomycin and cisplatin. That can only mean one thing." Then Grissom would say some cheesy line like "it looks like the ball's in our court now." If you ask me that program jumped the shark about three metro areas ago.

But back to our regularly scheduled blog entry.

So my stylist got this idea and she went to retrieve the wax they generally reserve for eyebrows. A rather novel idea I thought and I told her to go for it. Unfortunately she didn't have enough wax or large enough strips do do a whole head, so she sent me to the beauty supply store to buy my own.

When I came back twenty dollars poorer, she and another stylist took turns running to heat up wax and ripping the last bit of hair from my head. It wasn't as painful as I thought. The only place it hurt was around my ear and at the nape of my neck. As for the rest of my head, it was bright red from the whole ordeal but at least when they were finished I was truly bald.

Here's the kicker.

When she rang me up, she told me my total was seventy five dollars.

SEVENTY FIVE DOLLARS!

A seven. And a five.

And that didn't account for the twenty I spent at the beauty supply place.

When I asked her if she was joking she explained that had I gone to a more upscale salon and had two stylists working on my hair for that amount of time, they would have charged me $150.

"Would they have asked me to buy my own wax?" I asked.

She crossed out the $75 and instead wrote $55. Remember, this was in one of those in-and-out ten dollar jobbies. With a stylist I had gone to for years. Years, I tell you. When it was busy at times, I'd even be the one the stylists would ask to answer the phone and schedule peoples' appointments for them.

She joked that it was job security because now I wasn't going to be seeing her for several months.

Several months? Do you realize how badly I wanted to shout I got cancer, Lady; I might not be coming back at all. Though, come to think of it, then she probably would have scratched out the $55 and put $95. The money wasn't even the issue; it was the principle of the thing.

Oh well.

That was the last day my hair hit her floor.

Anyway, I got my hair cut today.