Brownilocks Checks In

I went to get a haircut this morning. Perhaps I've told you about my own personal beauty shop: Terrible Cuts. I used their check-in app. Because there's nothing I like better than cutting in line ahead of people who think they're up next. I don't agree with it, but if Terrible Cuts wants to give me the option to be a poor sport, I'll make use of it. Better me than them. Sure as I'd walk in and wait my turn, ten hairy people would arrive and all go ahead of me.

When I did my smart-phone check-in from my Save A Lot parking space, the wait time was 0 minutes. Of course when I got there, five people were inside, two being cut, two milling around, and one ensconced on a plastic black chair like she was never leaving.

A tweenage boy in football pants joined the millers at the pay counter. He had a new buzz cut, and looked kind of like Buzz in the Home Alone movie. My boys' hair never cooperated with a buzz cut. Theirs laid down, all sleek, like a seal. None of that cute spiky porcupiny toilet brush stiffness for their follicles. The buzz cutter swept up and called me next. Take THAT, already-waiting-woman-reading-a-women's-magazine! You can sit there with that dude who just came in, smelling all manly, like old leather shoes worn without socks, garden-plowing sweat, and pipe tobacco.

My Terrible Cutter the buzz cutter was perfectly adequate. She could have pleased Goldilocks herself. She took just enough time, cut just enough off, made just enough conversation, and ripped just enough roots from my scalp in her zealous up-clipping to shear the under layers. One area where she excelled was in whacking me with something that felt like a caveman's club or a medieval mace, once above the left ear, and once under the left eye. Let the record show that she did say, "Oops! Sorry!" both times. She did not have a hacking cough, or lean on me more than a Terrible Cutter should. In fact, she was quite adept at the hair salon ballet. Especially given the fact that neither I nor she were of acceptable BMI. She revolved around me like Saturn around Jupiter. Like those pudgy planets on the Jimmy Dean breakfast solar system commercials.

I welcomed her lack of small talk. I alternated between keeping my eyes closed, and watching the other Terrible Cutter work her magic in the mirror. She was on the same woman as when I entered the establishment. She was probably on her when I checked in from another town. She had been cutting in the beginning. Then she combed, like trying out various looks on her Barbie Styling Head. Then she spritzed that woman's locks with water. Combed some more. Got out the blow dryer. Poofed it up a bit. Spritzed it. Combed it. Snipped a little. It was as if that woman had been there so long that her just-cut hair had grown long enough for more cutting. I was paid for and out of there before she ever left the chair.

Hick and The Pony have yet to comment on my new 'do. That's okay. I'm sure my students will notice on Monday.