Orange You Glad It Wasn't You?

CRAP. It's now officially the 15th of September. Half the month is already gone and much to my shame, I've only managed to post one blog.

Once again, I've allowed myself to get caught up in the news (if you can call it that) and let my bloomers get in a twist. What is WRONG with me?! I have a self-imposed rule of not engaging in debates with others about politics or religion and I have broken that rule on several occasions during the past couple of weeks. I'm here here to tell you that I've had a very stern conversation with Me and may have even kicked my own ass a few times. I have promised Me to knock it off and get back to doing what Mr. Right always tells me to do. "Just hush up and sit there and look pretty." (I'm going to really catch some shiznit for that one.)

The tizzy I've been in has had me so mind-numbingly befuddled that I forgot to tell you about The Great Hair Incident. This one goes down on the books as one of the greats. Or...the worsts. However you want to look at it.

In an effort to begin my 41st year looking and feeling like the cougar that is Me, I decided to get all of the hairs on my head, colored, clipped and coiffed. Ooh la la. The hair gal I'd been using and whose work I really dug, up and moved shop to some hell hole out in the desert that required directions like, "Turn off the pavement onto the two-lane dirt road..." Uh uh. So, I made an appointment at a kind of upper end-ish chain salon that I'd been to before and, from which, had walked out with really kick ass hair.

I arrived at my appointment with The Duchess in tow. I was going to be there less than an hour and the Duchess l-o-v-e-s to go to hair salons, nail salons, shoe stores...anywhere there's girly stuff. She's an angel that way. Behaves marvelously. So, off I went, explaining to my stylist exactly what I wanted. Ms. Thing who was all of 21, smiled and said, "Do you want your roots done? The gray is starting to really show through." Well, hell. I debated for a minute or two while studying my roots and then, of course, opted for some color to be slapped on my head.

Ms.Thing proceeded to squeeze a bottle full of chemicals into my hair that smelled like it could peel paint off a barn. She massaged it into my head, patted it ever so sweetly, then...left. Apparently, she'd double booked herself and had another client to tend to. This did not bode well. As I read a magazine and listened to The Duchess make up hundreds of nonsensical knock knock jokes at which I pretended to laugh hilariously, I watched the clock's hands almost seem to go backwards. Ms. Thing finally came over and checked on me and said, "Five more minutes." She went back to her other client and came back in thirty minutes. I'd been there an hour and a half and, over an hour of that time, I'd been sitting with smelly goo in my hair.

By the time Ms. Thing came to rinse out my hair, my scalp was itching and burning a bit. The Duchess followed me over to the sink and as my hair was being rinsed out, she kept saying things like, "Oh, Mommy! Your hair is so pretty" and, "Mommy, your hair matches my shorts!" Her shorts were pink. Oh, shit.

Back in the chair, the towel came off and sure as shootin', Mommy's hair was pink. Damn. Ms. Thing made quite a production about asking me if my "hair pulled red." What?! I guess that's beauty school speak for, "Does your hair naturally have red in it ma'am?" Deciding loudly that, "This just won't do, " she proceeded to squeeze another bottle of goo into my hair. Thirty minutes later, she returned from her other client to check my head which was now whimpering and whining a bit. (Or, maybe that was me.)

Off to the sink we went for another rinse. The Duchess leaned over the chair next to me and said, "Mommy...your hair looks like the sun!" In my head, I was dropping the f-bomb like a sailor on shore leave.

Back to the chair with the towel off and now...Mommy's hair did indeed look like the sun. The kind of sun you see in picture books about the Old West where a cowboy and his horse are headed into the sunset and there's a lovely tangerine glow blazing over the horizon.

By now, I'd spent 2 1/2 hours in the chair. My stomach was growling and I was nervous that the Duchess would soon be growing restless. Quite frankly, between the hunger pangs, worrying about The Duchess and the ever increasing feeling that my scalp was going to spontaneously combust, I was a bit of a wreck. My foot began tapping incessantly and I couldn't seem to control it. Not only was I having minor heart palpitations about the state of my hair, I couldn't keep my eyes off of the poor girl who was Ms. Thing's other victim. She'd been sitting in a full-on foil hair do under a dryer for about an hour now. I had visions of us clinging to each other and crying as we sat in our jail cell together for the beating death of one, Ms. Thing: beauty school dropout.

I picked up my cell phone and called Mr. Right and asked him to high tail it in my direction the very second he could leave work. And, because he is indeed Mr. Right, he assured me that he would wrap things up a.s.a.p and come to the rescue of his fair tangerine-haired maiden.

After consulting a couple of other stylists, Ms. Thing informed me that she was going to put a "toner" on my hair. She also informed me that because she had totally crapped up my hair (not what she said, but what I was thinking), she would only charge me for the cut and not the color. I looked at the clock. Three hours into this and I hadn't even had my hair cut yet.

"Toner" in place, I sat and waited. Again. Then, back to rinse. Still orange. Another toner. Better, but still resembling the glow emitted from a Napalm drop in those Vietnam movies.

By this time, Mr. Right had arrived to rescue The Duchess and take her for drink. (She was treated to a Sprite although I think she much more deserved a vodka tonic for all she'd been put through.) Ms. Thing was hovering over me asking if the color was okay so of course I lied and told her it was. I'd been there for three and a half hours for hell's sake. It was time for a cut.

She snipped, clipped, thinned, textured and every other verb they learn in beauty school and then proceeded to blow out my hair. By this time, I almost literally couldn't see straight from all of the chemicals affecting my contacts. My head felt like it had been tenderized with one of those primitive meat mallets and my stomach was in complete revolt. I forced a smile, paid my bill and got the hell out of there.

Mr. Right convinced me not to touch my hair until the next morning. "Let it rest," he said. I have no idea what that meant. But, I let it rest.

The next morning, I showered and washed my hair. It still reeked and my head still hurt. I exited the shower, towel-dried my hair and began to style it. It didn't work. One side flipped under perfectly and the other side went in three different directions. And...it still glowed orange. Finally, I turned and held a small mirror up to check the back of my head and noticed for the first time that I had a huge, almost black patch of hair, right at the back of my head. Ms. Thing had colored the underside of my hair in back, four shades darker than my normal hair color which was now twenty shades darker than my current day-glo tangerine blond. I'm somewhat embarrassed to tell you that I looked like a hooker.

I cried. Then I called Mr. Right and cried. Then I called the salon manager and cried.

Long story short, (HA!!! My loquaciousness cannot be stifled!) a lovely stylist named Elizabeth, managed to do a decent job of removing the orange and patching up the horrifically unbalanced layers in my hair and didn't charge me a thing. I tipped her twenty bucks for her time and for managing to not make my hair fall out.

My hair turned out so light that my roots started showing almost immediately. And, I still had the black patch in back. So, this past Saturday morning, I'd had enough. I reached up to the top shelf in the closet and pulled down the box of "Champagne Blond" hair color. (Preference by L'Oreal, because I'm worth it, dammit.) Mr. Right almost stroked out. "What are you DOING?! Your hair is going to fall OUT!" I was willing to take my chances.

Twenty-five minutes later, a rinse and a blow dry and ta-da!! Hair that no self-respecting hooker would be caught dead with. It looked damn normal. Unfortunately, I have no skill in cutting hair, so I haven't been able to rectify the lousy cut. I have, however, been seriously contemplating cutting it all off and starting over. I look great with short hair, but Mr. Right has been exercising his Constitutional right to peaceful protest.

I shall take Mr. Right's wishes into consideration, carefully weigh my feelings about growing my hair out all over again (it's an excruciatingly long process), consider all of my options, then go get my hair cut like Halle Berry's. Uh...yeah. I wanna look like this:

A haircut will accomplish that, right? Right....