Before and after the salon

Call me fussy, but I've always thought that you should come out of a hair salon looking better than when you went in. I mean, as long as you're going to pay them a million bucks to snip, color, and primp your hair, shouldn't you look like a million bucks?

A friend once informed me that the idea behind getting your hair done was to go often enough that your hair continued to always look the same. There shouldn't be any drastic, 3-inch differences, she said. Pfft, I said, as politely as I could. If I'm going to pay a fortune for someone to cut my hair, I want something to show for it!

So usually, I wait until my hair is so shaggy that I resemble a dog whose breeding has gone horribly wrong. This generally evokes a great wave of pity from stylists. Sometimes they actually cluck to themselves. They immediately plunge my head under the water and scrub for all they're worth, as if by applying enough products and rubbing hard enough, they can wipe that mess right off my head and start all over.

You'd think, given this opportunity to make over a poor soul who doesn't know a bristle hair brush from a meat cleaver, stylists would make me look a hundred times better. But somehow, though they generally do a good job on the actual cut, when it comes to the styling they seem to mentally check out. When they are done, I look in the mirror and wonder who that poor soul with the dead animal on her head is. I realize, with some shock, that it is me. Is this truly how a stylist -- who, for goodness' sake, is trained in beauty -- thinks I should look?

I always slink back to my car, praying I don't see anyone I know. Not that they would recognize me, looking like Tina Turner as I invariably do. I'm ashamed for even perfect strangers to see me after I've come from the salon. "I don't always look like this," I want to explain to passersby.

Once, in a desperate attempt to get a normal-looking, flattering style, I brought in a picture of myself and told the stylist that's how I wanted my hair done. I figured this was pretty safe. The style had been done before, on me, so I was pretty sure it could be duplicated. When she was done, however, I no more resembled my photograph than Santa Claus.

The ultimate indignation is that for the privilege of looking horrible, I get to shell out enough money to buy a month's worth of groceries. Joe prefers to remain ignorant of exactly how much these little jaunts to the hair salon cost. I gave him a rough estimate once. It's a good thing he was sitting down.