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The Six O’Clock Emergency

The phone rang at three minutes to close.

Everyone in a service profession knows the phone call that comes at three minutes to close. It is never good news. It is never someone calling to say they loved their color. I answered it anyway, because thirty years in and I still haven’t learned.

The man on the other end was in a state I would describe, clinically, as unraveling.

He had a date at seven-thirty. His first date since the divorce. His first date, if we’re being...

Fort Knox

Every family has a system for distributing news, whether they know it or not. Somebody is the announcer. Somebody is the one who finds out last and is hurt about it. And in one family — I won’t say which — the system ran directly through my chair.

Her name was Carol. For fifteen years, Carol booked an appointment exactly six weeks before every major family event, and she used that appointment the way other people use a rehearsal space.

“I’m announcing at Thanksgiving,” she’d say,...

I missed last week, the holiday here had me all sorts of twisted up as far as my regular posts, so I'm sorry, but here's the latest from behind my chair.

The Perm Ultimatum

Dottie had been getting the same perm from me every twelve weeks for as long as I’d been doing hair, and from somebody else for a good decade before that. The same rods. The same solution. The same tight, cloud-shaped result that had not been fashionable since roughly 1987 and had not been asked to be.

I could have done...

The Line

I want to be clear that I was a guest at this wedding. The bride was my cousin. I was not working. I had been very explicit with myself about this.

I had also, of course, packed a small backup kit. Hairpins. Hairspray. Trimmers. Just in case.

I am told this is what people in recovery call enabling behavior.

My cousin looked beautiful, because she was my cousin and that’s how this works. Her hair was perfect. She did not need me. I’d checked twice, just to be sure, and then a third time...

Busted

This was back when fuchsia hair was just starting to be a thing. I had bleached mine out and dyed it the brightest, loudest pink the bottle promised, and it had delivered. I looked like a highlighter that had gotten into something. I loved it.

A dad came in with his son that morning. Seven years old, give or take. Standard Saturday haircut energy — dad scrolling through his phone, kid dragging his feet because he’d rather be anywhere else.

The kid stepped through the door, looked up, and...

Prince Charming, Royalty Free

I want to preface this by saying I am a hairdresser, not a detective.

That said.

Melissa was in my chair first, color processing, wrapped up and waiting the way clients do — phone out, perfectly content to show me pictures of her life while I worked on someone else. She’d been seeing someone new. Long distance. They’d met online a few months back, hadn’t met in person yet, but things were serious. She had a whole album.

“He’s handsome,” I said, because he was. Almost...

Creating a New Place from an Old Memory

There's something nobody tells you about Kansas until you've driven it yourself.

It's flat. Really flat. The kind of flat that stops being a joke and starts being something else entirely once you're actually out on the road with nothing between you and the horizon but wheat fields and sky. You can see for miles in every direction. You can see storms coming from an hour away. You can see the water tower of the next town long before you reach it.

And if...

The Best Mistake I Ever Made

I want to say it was intentional. I really do. It would make a much better story if I told you I looked at my appointment book, saw an opportunity, and decided to play a little providence.

That is not what happened.

What happened is that I double-booked a Tuesday afternoon in a way that should have been a disaster and somehow — through a combination of luck, chaos, and the fact that kids’ haircuts are mercifully short — became the best scheduling mistake of my...

The Origin Legend

If you’ve ever driven into Monet, Kansas for the first time, you already know the moment I’m talking about.

You’re out on the flat, the road stretching ahead of you like someone laid it down with a ruler, and then — there they are. Rising up out of the prairie like they have absolutely no business being there. Grain elevator towers painted in...

The Cat

I want to be clear that I have heard a lot of things in thirty years. I have heard confessions, declarations, overshares, and at least three separate instances of someone trying to describe their symptoms to me as though I went to medical school after cosmetology.

But Margaret was the first client who ever brought her cat.

Not a carrier. Not a bag. Just — the cat. In her arms. Like this was a thing people did.

“He gets anxious when I leave,” she explained, settling into the chair as...

The Secret That Wasn’t

Diane had been coming to me for eleven years when she sat down in my chair one Tuesday afternoon, looked both ways like she was crossing a highway, and announced in a stage whisper that she had a secret.

I set down my comb.

“Gary and I are separating,” she breathed. “I haven’t told a soul.”

I nodded slowly, with what I hoped was an expression of appropriate surprise.

What I did not tell Diane was that Gary had told his barber two weeks prior. His barber told his wife. His...