My Hairdresser and I

"I embrace change"

This is something I say so often I believe it wholeheartedly. If asked to give a reason why I could spout you additional high-falutin lines like: Change is the stuff of life itself, change is the only constant, change makes the world go round, change is necessary because the alternative is stagnation and stagnation leads to disease and death, change brings new fresh better ideas into reality, change is good, yada yada yada and so on.

But the point is: I do believe it or I believe that I believe - which is just as effective until I was brought up short with the random thought that there IS one area in my life that I fear change. Well, I guess, every general aphorism like this cannot apply to all specifics.

The one area that I fear change is my hairstyle.

Going to the hairdresser has been as stressful as going to the dentist for some people. In fact, given a choice, I'd go to the dentist 10 times before I could be dragged kicking and shrieking to the hairdresser. Why is that? I fear the scissors more than the needle! As a child growing up with asthma before the invention of the nebulizer or the inhaler, I was often rushed to the hospital and given this gigantic horse needle, poked into my arm and then taped in place for about 20 minutes. That may be why I see the needle as my friend.

As a non-crying, also non-smiling baby, toddler and child, I had a spurious kind of fame for about 2 and a half years when grandpa, aunties and uncles grab me and pose with me in enough pictures. Then my brother Harry arrived on the scene. He too hardly cried, but he was constantly laughing. He stole everybody's heart. I wasn't shunted aside because we were still the only 2 babies in the extended family for another 7 years more. But I was constantly told I'm a grumpy child.

I hardly like to look in the mirror and confirm what everybody say I am and somehow or other the thought of the power of the hairdresser to change my looks petrify me. Such were my morbidity in my early years that it never occurred to me that the hairdresser could make me look prettier, could transform me into a princess. I was convinced that the hairdresser will turn me from The Grumpy Child into The Frightful Toad. I believed it so much that after the rare occasions I was successfully dragged to the hairdresser, I look in the mirror and I see Cinderella's ugly step-sisters (a la Walt Disney's depiction in the animated movie)

Later, when I gained the self-confidence that was to propel me into my exciting and successful adult life, I still had not gained the appropriate level of self-esteem as far as my looks are concerned. I still see Cinderella's ugly step sisters leering at me when I look in the mirror.

That all changed after I got married. Larry dragged me to his stylist of 10 years: Albert Nico. He is a most talented stylist, but cranky, belligerent & opinionated. But he's the very stylist for me. He doesn't require, nor encourage, and would downright snub you if you so much as show him a picture of some hairstyle that you would like. Which suits me just fine as I am petrified about choosing a style from some picture of some celebrity. I mean, I don't look like her, have her face shape nor her coloring, or height or body shape, I don't have her hair texture, I don't live her life - how could I want her hairstyle and hope I'd be transformed overnight to be her?

Albert's modus operandi: he touches your hair, he scrutinizes you literally from head to foot, he asks what you do (for a living), he asks what image / personality / character you want to portray to the world at large. Sometimes he sneers if answer to Question 2 is incongruent to answer to Question 1. And then he gets to work to create the outer you that matches the inner you.

Albert Nico likes to snap: "I don't question or try to teach you on your expertise. So don't you even dare to suggest opinions about MY expertise!" Music to my very ears. Of course, I eventually found out that a lot of women friends that go to him after my glowing reports come away disgruntled about his forthrightness. A lot of them never go back because they have their own opinions of how they want to look like and won't take lip from him.

As for me, I have been blissfully putting myself under his magic hands for the last 14 years and everytime I walk out of his saloon, I finally feel like a princess!