Overheard at the salon
I was getting my hair done this weekend (if you really happen to care, you can check out the results on my Chicago Tonight appearance tonight; my commentary appears at the very end of the show) and had one of those little "slice of urban life" moments that, sadly, you just don't read about in the New Yorker.
A woman came in for a "consultation" with my stylist/colorist. He took a moment from cutting my hair to talk to her. They stood just a few feet away from the chair where I was perched.
Uncharacteristically, I wasn't eavesdropping, but I couldn't help catching the gist of the conversation.
The woman, who had two long blond braids sticking out from under a stylish cashmere ski cap, said she hadn't had her color done in several months and was worried about whether it would ever be possible to get the dark roots (now a couple inches long) to match the rest of her very blond hair. She had a magazine with her, and she pointed to a picture in it, which, I assumed, was an example of the color she wanted to achieve.
There was a brief, highly technical discussion of how this might be achieved. She went back to the front desk to make an appointment and my stylist returned his attention to my new 'do.
After a minute or two, he asked, "Did you happen to catch any of that?"
"Not really," I said. "What was up?"
"She said she's from New Orleans and that she lost everything — including her hairdresser — in the flood."
We talked about this for a few minutes and decided she must have meant that she lost touch with the hairdresser, rather than that the stylist, um, floated away or something worse.
"So she hasn't gotten her hair done since," he continued.
"Wow," I said, realizing that this was the kind of hardship that would, even more than, say, having to move away from my cozy, familiar neighborhood, that would really cripple me emotionally. I tried not to dwell on this new revelation of the depths of my shallowness.
"So," he went on, "she brought a picture with her. I thought it was just, you know, a random magazine photo, but it was actually a magazine that she was in. She was showing me a picture of what her hair used to look like."
And, he didn't want to be judgmental, but he was slightly taken aback by the fact that the magazine was not so much a magazine as, well, a brochure for the escort service where she worked.
This, frankly, is a whole category of displace New Orleans workers I hadn't even thought about. I don't suppose the government is very quick to replace not-quite-legal income.
Naturally, this story has now become associated in my mind with already nascent obsession with the song "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp." (I also have this idea to make a "Grey Album"-style remix of the song that will include some of the vocal tracks from Kanye West's "Jesus Walks," but that's a topic for another day.)
