[I'm going to have to go with the Super Mario Brothers theme for today's post, though I have no idea what it's called. But you probably already have it stuck in your mind if you know what I'm talking about. Or, if you prefer, think of your favorite performance of Puccini's opera, "Tosca" when Tosca realizes Cavaradossi is truly dead and cries out, "Mario, Mario" before plunging to her death -- but I guess that's kind of a downer way to begin a blog, so maybe not so much.]
So, first of all, apologies for the delay in posting. There's just been so much going on it has been hard to keep on top of everything. So a quick catch-up entry from two weeks ago (hence the backdating in the title).
Hair is a tricky thing. I think I've spent most of my life just trying to cope with the myriad cowlicks (yeah, it's a real word, not necessarily related to my rural childhood) on my head and just trying to minimize the number of bad hair days, rather than thinking it possible to have a great hair day. It's not exactly a priority of mine.
(I feel compelled, though, to share some anecdotes from my childhood here. I generally had short hair growing up until around high school when my brothers' incessant chiding that you "can't trust a woman with short hair" and other niceties finally got to me and I grew it out. I HATED it long. This was also the late 80s when perms were popular so I looked like I had a curly pyramid -- like a hair topiary or something -- on my head. Marge Simpson's hair style had little on me except the handsome blue color. Anyway, I finally couldn't stand it a day longer and got it chopped off to something more manageable. After which my brothers said it was about time I cut it because the long hair looked really bad on me. Oh, teenagers can be so cruel.... Twice since then I have grown it out again. This last time was perhaps the best, but I'm still not saying it looked good. And it took forever to grow out all the layers, etc.)
So forward to me showing up in Germany with a mop growing mangier by the day as the end of my second month here approached. There are some kind of nutty haircuts here, so I was a bit concerned about the idea of going into a salon and having a stylist start whacking away and be unable to communicate in German to tell her to stop. And I was particularly concerned as it relates to color as there are women here with true red hair or blue hair and I couldn't see that working at the office. Fortunately for me, my Chicago hairdresser came through. She gave me the recipe for the color for my highlights and lowlights before I left, which are for Wella products that are, after all, German. All good. AND she apparently reached out to some of her colleagues around the world and e-mailed me the names of two hairdressers in Frankfurt recommended by what appears to be a friend of a friend. His first name is Mario so, to protect the innocent, we'll call his establishment Salon Mario.
With the assistance of one of my colleagues at the office, I was able to schedule an appointment and asked for a stylist who spoke English. The woman said that would not be a problem at all. So at the appointed time, I wandered over to Salon Mario, which is about a 10 minute walk from my apartment in a nice little townhouse kind of building. When I walked in there was a guy standing behind the counter and I started to say, in my best German, that I had an appointment and my name was Priser before he cut me off, started speaking in rapid German, and apparently confirmed that I indeed had an appointment before taking my coat and ushering me into the next room. I took a seat in a chair at a station that was outfitted with various German-version-of-People-Magazine publications, all of which had one or both Obamas on the front cover. I felt at home already.... And then I was offered some coffee, cappuccino, espresso, where my German was "busted" when I said "Yeah, that'd be great," without thinking. Doh!
There were three people working there (the guy who initially greeted me left shortly thereafter) -- Mario himself, a young woman who appears to wash people's hair and assist with the coloring process, and another very young woman who just, um, stands there quietly. Not sure what she does, though she might have been the one who brought me coffee. In any event, an interesting staffing model. There were several styling stations (I don't know what the official salon name for them would be), though since I was the last appointment slot of the day only two were in use. I'm not certain whether the place is normally humming with activity and there are several stylists working there, but I was nevertheless honored to have Mario himself attend to my styling needs.
Mario is, of course, a wickedly good looking and stylish guy. More importantly, though, he speaks English and likes to laugh. He seemed fascinated and delighted that I had been referred to him through contacts in the US. I told him that Salon Mario had truly gone global, versus just globally available information on his website. He took a look at my hair and said that, based on our conversation, he thought my style was too conservative for my personality. Huh? That my hair didn't look like that of a person who likes to laugh and have a good time. I reminded him that I am a nerdy accountant/lawyer and our clients expect a certain degree of conservative behavior and appearance. He showed me a style in a book that I thought was nice and I thought we were on the same wavelength as he set to work.
That is, set to work destroying all the growing-out-of layers that had been going on for years. Creatings bangs that also had been carefully grown out. And, um, seeming to tease my cowlicks into a degree of unruliness I hadn't imagined possible. But I figured that after he finished drying the hair he would continue to clean things up. Um, no, not so much. This was the intended look. He described it as "natural" but I see it more as a perpetual bedhead look, tending towards the organic. I asked how to, um, recreate this carefully controlled chaos, and he said just dry it without a brush, smear some product in my palms and crunch it onto the ends of the hair (which product he actually gave to me since I had apparently delighted him by the "going global" thing and perhaps because I had let him destroy my conservative 'do), and I'd be ready. Uhhh, not so much. It's hard for an accountant to deliberately create and maintain chaos. I'm trying, though.
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