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Blond over blue
Jun. 13th, 2002 11:15 amI'm afraid this may be the entry in which I make myself sound vain and pretentious. So be it, if I haven't already done it many times over.
Laura and I have been trying to get our hairdresser Brian over for an appointment. Brian is Danish, he makes house calls, and he's affordable, so every few months we have him over. I get my hair bleached and cut, and Laura does ... well, what she gets done to her hair. It costs us each a hundred bucks.
My hair's been getting shaggy*, and there are a couple of big events coming up in the next month or so—a wedding for our friends Ron and Edie, and a reading for me at KGB. So it's high time for a cut and color. We've been trying to get Brian on the phone for weeks and arrange for him to come, well, this evening. Finally he called yesterday and said, "Sorry, I can't come Thursday, but would a week from today work?"
Laura, exasperated, agreed, but didn't remember that I have an engagement that night.
Well, it's so hard to pin down Brian that we decided, fuck it, let Laura keep the Wednesday appointment and I'll try to get one with Astrud, the world's most gorgeous hairdresser, who works at the salon next door to Laura's old apartment in the East Village. I called the salon early in the afternoon, hoping to get an appointment with Astrud next week, before the June 22nd wedding. Astrud, it turned out, would be out of town next week. But I could come that evening at seven.
So I set the appointment and showed up at the salon last night at seven. Unfortunately, because it was always my habit to get a cut and color with Astrud, and because I'm a boy, I forgot to specify that I needed a two-hour appointment. Astrud had another appointment at eight. Embarrassed, I volunteered that I could just get a cut and then come back after the wedding but before the reading for the bleach job. She did some calculating, then graciously decided that she could fit it all in.
So she gooped up my hair and let it cook under plastic wrap while she dealt with the other haircut (and while I, unshaven, sat reading Exodus from the New Sun in the window of this East Village salon full of women). She had one of the other hairdressers shampoo me, then put toner in my hair herself at the sink. (Ah, to lie back and be fussed over by beautiful women leaning over my face.) Then she gave me my cut, and we were done not long after nine.
When I went to pay, the woman at the counter rang me up, for a cut and double-process, for $213.00. I just about swallowed my tongue. Astrud seemed surprised too—she is recently back from a year in San Francisco, and the rates have obviously gone up. Oh, well. I gulped and paid.
My hair is just slightly more orange than I like it, but it mostly looks fine. The nice thing is, the hair goop didn't hurt nearly as much as it does when Brian does it, and it didn't stay in as long. At those prices, it will probably be back to popping Advil in Brian's torture rack next time, but it was an emergency this time and not unpleasant to sit through in the least.
__________
* A strange word for me to use right now, because I've been immersed for the last month in Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun tetralogy. In the thieves' cant of that world, "shaggy" is a vulgar modifier approximately equivalent to our "fucking."
Laura and I have been trying to get our hairdresser Brian over for an appointment. Brian is Danish, he makes house calls, and he's affordable, so every few months we have him over. I get my hair bleached and cut, and Laura does ... well, what she gets done to her hair. It costs us each a hundred bucks.
My hair's been getting shaggy*, and there are a couple of big events coming up in the next month or so—a wedding for our friends Ron and Edie, and a reading for me at KGB. So it's high time for a cut and color. We've been trying to get Brian on the phone for weeks and arrange for him to come, well, this evening. Finally he called yesterday and said, "Sorry, I can't come Thursday, but would a week from today work?"
Laura, exasperated, agreed, but didn't remember that I have an engagement that night.
Well, it's so hard to pin down Brian that we decided, fuck it, let Laura keep the Wednesday appointment and I'll try to get one with Astrud, the world's most gorgeous hairdresser, who works at the salon next door to Laura's old apartment in the East Village. I called the salon early in the afternoon, hoping to get an appointment with Astrud next week, before the June 22nd wedding. Astrud, it turned out, would be out of town next week. But I could come that evening at seven.
So I set the appointment and showed up at the salon last night at seven. Unfortunately, because it was always my habit to get a cut and color with Astrud, and because I'm a boy, I forgot to specify that I needed a two-hour appointment. Astrud had another appointment at eight. Embarrassed, I volunteered that I could just get a cut and then come back after the wedding but before the reading for the bleach job. She did some calculating, then graciously decided that she could fit it all in.
So she gooped up my hair and let it cook under plastic wrap while she dealt with the other haircut (and while I, unshaven, sat reading Exodus from the New Sun in the window of this East Village salon full of women). She had one of the other hairdressers shampoo me, then put toner in my hair herself at the sink. (Ah, to lie back and be fussed over by beautiful women leaning over my face.) Then she gave me my cut, and we were done not long after nine.
When I went to pay, the woman at the counter rang me up, for a cut and double-process, for $213.00. I just about swallowed my tongue. Astrud seemed surprised too—she is recently back from a year in San Francisco, and the rates have obviously gone up. Oh, well. I gulped and paid.
My hair is just slightly more orange than I like it, but it mostly looks fine. The nice thing is, the hair goop didn't hurt nearly as much as it does when Brian does it, and it didn't stay in as long. At those prices, it will probably be back to popping Advil in Brian's torture rack next time, but it was an emergency this time and not unpleasant to sit through in the least.
__________
* A strange word for me to use right now, because I've been immersed for the last month in Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun tetralogy. In the thieves' cant of that world, "shaggy" is a vulgar modifier approximately equivalent to our "fucking."
