30days30years

The haircut

Those who ever went to the Australian Open in the mid-noughties would know one of the rituals of going to the tennis in Melbourne for a woman was lining up at the Garnier tent for a heap of freebees.

You would queue for hours, even in the rain sometimes, for a five-minute massage, facial or hair styling and then receive a goody bag with about $100 worth of Garnier products in it. Nice.

One year myself and my friend Renee made the mistake of getting our hair styled, figuring a facial would ruin our make-up and thus my chances of meeting and therefore marrying Andy Roddick. How much damage can these girls getting paid minimum wage to twist your hair into a ponytail and spray it with some hairspray really do? Quite a lot as it turned out and we spent the rest of the day sporting these God-aweful up-dos that a three-year-old playing hairdressers could have topped. (I put this down as the sole reason A-Rod married someone else!)

Thus it was massages-only for many years after that until one day I had a weird experience of a woman massaging my ears. I was wearing a new white shirt this particular day and didn’t like the thought of someone’s dirty hands making marks on it during a back massage so asked the girl just to give me a head massage. It turned into this weird sensual ear rubbing thing that I wasn’t down with at all!

Anyway so last night I was at a shopping mall in Singapore waiting for my friend Olga to finish playing tennis and stopped in at a hairdresser for a much needed haircut.

It was an all-Asian salon but they seemed to understand I needed a cut and blow dry and soon I was seated in front of a very young nervous-looking Asian boy. I was politely asked if I wanted a cup of tea from one of the front desk girls and figured I would soon be whisked over to the basin to have my hair washed.

Instead, the boy reaches for all these weird and wonderful hair products which he mixes into a concoction and then starts to lump onto my head.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I yell out. “I want a shampoo, cut and a blow dry.” He giggles awkwardly, nods and continues anyway. Did I miss the memo on the new hair washing procedures or is it normal now that people get their hair washed whilst sitting up in the chair they do your cut in rather than lying back with your head in a basin?

“Wait! I want a shampoo. Don’t we need to be at the basin?” He looks at me blankly and goes and finds a colleague who speaks English. He is equally as confused but we eventually make our way to the basin.

Usual shampoo etiquette would suggest you get a 2-3 minute shampoo, sometimes two, followed by a condition with a bit of a head massage thrown in for good measure. Not in this salon. My shampoo lasted for 12 minutes (I only know because I had looked at my watch as I sat down to check the time.), creating such a mound of soap suds they began billowing out of the basin!!!

The boy tried madly to control them but instead of stopping and rinsing, he simply kept going, massaging my head and down my spine so the back of my top was soaked. He then starts working on my ears, which if I’m not mistaken, aren’t hairy!!! Are my ears that big that they scream ‘come play with me?’ All he managed to do was poke shampoo down into my ears drums!

We get back to the chair and, as if on cue, this violin music comes on the stereo. It’s this really fiery passionate piece (all very Vanessa Mae) which sends the boy into some kind of trance because he then starts pulling my hair and cutting the ends as if he’s doing the imposing violin movements himself. It was like something out of a Mr Bean clip I tell you! So here’s this boy prancing around me at a rate of knots and then he start to do the front section where they comb your hair forward so you look like Cousin It from the Addams family. You would think he would be a little bit more cautious around the eyes but nooo. The song was reaching its crescendo so he introduces a quickstep-type dance move along with a wrist flicking action which hurls his scissors towards my eyeballs. WTF!?

I think I’m home and hose when the blow drying starts but then it seemed he’d moved onto his impression of Tom Cruise in Cocktail where he’d hold the hairdryer at it’s widest point instead of the handle and then drop it only to catch it seconds before it fell to the floor. Obviously my head got in the way at certain points! Fortunately, he actually did a pretty good job of making me look semi respectable again.

Meanwhile I look over to the chick sitting across from me and see that her hairdresser is shampooing her hair in the seat. He had this crazy technique of pilling all the suds up onto the top of her hair like a barnet and then had to make a dash to the basin every two seconds so it didn’t topple into the poor girl’s face.

Best hairdresser experience EVER.

ps Isn’t it funny when you see something somewhere for the first time in ages and then you see it everywhere? Today I went to a massive convenience store called Mustafas to pick up a couple of things and what did the checkout chick secure my bag with – a cable tie!

pps – I carried a watermelon today. That never gets less funny! 🙂