Hairy Mary

When I was a kid, Mary, the neighborhood hairdresser, was twenty years older that most of the moms of my friends. She had one teenage son our age, and she doted on this change of life boy even though they argued like cats and dogs.While my friends and I were hoofing it ten blocks to school, or parking our bums on city bus bench seats, her boy's bucket was comfortably positioned in leather bucket seats. Mary bought her pride and joy his own pride and joy, a muscle car with a Hemi engine.

If you wanted a tight perm or a wash and curl, Mary was the go-to gal for the older gals in
the neighborhood. Everyone knew she was a bit off kilter. She would always squeak her mind, and that woman spread gossip like Dippity Do.

When someone came in and asked for a chin length cut, she'd give  them the stink eye and cackle, "You don't have the face for straight hair. You have to be beautiful to wear your hair straight." She sold my mom and mother-in-law many a perm with that line and she put a few worry lines on their mugs with that nonsense of hers as she flipped her bottle-blond straight locks over her shoulder.

One day the gossip mongers gathered for coffee klatch and someone brought up Mary's latest. Seems she wandered into her own bathroom one day before going off to her shop and picked up a can of hair spray and spritzed her hair with half a can of super hold.

When she walked into her salon with mirrored walls, she screamed at the red haired hag looking back at her. Seems she picked up a can of Larry's red spray paint which he had left in the bathroom.

I nearly died laughing, and thinking about it years later, it still made me chuckle...until this past Monday. I shall laugh no more at Hairy Mary. I was late for work, suffering from tummy distress. I reached for the hairspray and spritzed like crazy. I walked into the school bathroom and thought some straight haired chick had beat me to the seat when I saw myself in the mirror. It was like a haunting from Mary. Beware, not only does Febreeze take the stench out of carpets and draperies, it also takes the curl right out of poufy curling-ironed hair.