A HAIR RAISING TALE

26 August 2003

It is less than 2 weeks before I leave for Australia and, after planning this trip for so long, I'm suddenly starting to worry about the little details, afraid that I'll forget something. (As my friend Ron points out, they probably have toothpaste, shampoo and sox in Australia in case I forget something vital!)

So I'm now packing my suitcase (and since things are going in groups into vacuum packed bags to compact them, I've lost track of what I have already packed!), making sure I have all the proper paperwork and copies of everything somewhere, picking out music to take for the new CD player I bought, trying to decide if I'm taking the Palm Pilot after all...just little stuff like that.

One big thing on my time table was getting my hair cut. I had it all planned. The guy who cut my hair last time did a really nice job--better than it had ever been cut in a very long time.

I thought I had written about my last haircut, but apparently I did not...at least Google can't find it (and if Google can't find it, it must not exist). I normally go to SuperCuts. Since my hair is naturally curly it generally does what it wants, so I don't have a regular person who cuts my hair. But I went to a different walk-in shop and I met Robbie.

Robbie is huge and hairy and gay. He has big bushy straight hair below his shoulders and a full beard and he probably is pushing 400 lbs. He told me that when he cuts kids hair they think he's Hagrid from the Harry Potter movies, which is even harder to deny since Hagrid is played by actor Robbie Coultraine and this guy's name is also Robbie. And he's the spitting image of the on-screen Hagrid.

I have to admit that I wasn't really encouraged by his hair cut at first, but after he finished and the hair dried I discovered he had done what was only done to me once before. He had asked me if my hair was naturally curly, and then he cut it to the curl. The result was one of the best haircuts I've ever had. (Maybe you can't tell from the photo, but trust me--it was one of the best I've ever had!)

So my plan was to have my hair cut this week, giving it a week to grow out from that "just cut" look, but soon enough to departure day that I can probably make it 6 weeks without having to have it cut again.

As I said, he worked in a walk-in place, so I've been putting off calling to find out if I can make an appointment with him. But today was the day. I got the telephone and placed the call.

"Robbie doesn't work here any more," I was told.

Naturally nobody was going to tell me if he'd moved to a new place. "I don't know--but we'll be happy to have you see someone else," I was told. Well, that was fair.   If he'd moved on, he was now the competition.

I was depressed. I'd been planning this for weeks.

But all was not lost. I'm on an e-mail for women in the Davis area, so I decided to put out the word to the list. Within an hour I'd received one message about how he'd been fired and why, and another message about how he'd moved to a new place and that they were relying on word of mouth to get the word out.

It's nice living in a small town sometimes!

According to the first writer, he has a drinking problem and had been botching hair cuts. In fact, she says, he botched hers so badly that the shop gave her two free cuts to make up for it.

The second writer gave the information about where he's working now, a more upscale place across the parking lot from the first place.

I debated about whether to make an appointment or not, given the bad review by the first writer, but I decided that he is obviously in the honeymoon phase at his new place and may be on his best behavior, so what the heck. I called and got an appointment for Wednesday, on my way home from Physical Therapy.

I figure either it will be another really good haircut, or it will be the "average" cut that I usually get, or it will be botched...but the nice thing about having curly hair is that it kind of does its own thing, so I figure even a botched haircut will work...and there's that chance that history will repeat itself and it will be a good cut again.