06-28-01
Mamie. Oh, Mamie.
Do you ever have that one person that rubs you the wrong way, for no particular reason? They don't do anything specifically wrong, or entirely irritating, but manage to bug the fuck out of you, merely by being in your presence?
Well, Mamie Schmidt is that person for me.
She is this tiny, sweet, frail, little 92 year-old woman that drives me criminally insane a couple of times a month.
Let me explain:
There exists an entire subset of women that visit the beauty parlor once a week to gossip and get their hair done. This is a throwback to the olden days of yore, like the 50's and 60's, where you had your hair set once a week, and it stayed in place due to the miracles of shellac-hairspray, wrapping your coiffure in toilet paper before going to bed, and sleeping on satin pillowcases.
Mostly, these days, it's the granny-set that adhere to this time-honored practice. They had it done then, and they're sure as hell going to have it done like that now, or at least until they die. I'm not sure about whether or not Mamie is in fact a granny or not, but I'll lump her in just the same. Well, except for one ciritical difference: living on a fixed income, Mamie feels that visiting the salon weekly to have her hair done is an unnecessary expense. It is apparently more economical to only come in for a set every two or three weeks. I've been doing Mamie's hair for a couple of years, and I'm the only person that washes it ever, herself included. You do the math on that there.
Let me also add that she smokes a lot. And, apparently, layering on the Aquanet every single day negates the need for regular cleansing. I wonder if the scientists at NASA are aware of this little fact. Anyway, she shambles in for her appointments, shaking like she's being touched by an invisible set of "magic fingers," every couple or three weeks, looking for some sweet hair loving.
But it is hard, oh, is it hard.
Three weeks ago, I gave her a teensy tiny-rod perm like all the other Afro-haired grannies have. After the perm was done, I set her on rollers and stuck her under a dryer until she way dry, removed the rollers, combed her out, and then sprayed her hair until it wouldn't move, the end result of this being a helmet-like bob, with half-bangs and subtle waves throughout.
Most little old grannies with these types of hairstyles are secretly harboring Afros -- something about the tiny curls serving as some sort of style support mechanism. Now, with a fresh perm of this nature, frequently the first set is a little fuzzy and a little tighter in the curl than usual, but then if you come in a week later and have your hair done, or wash it yourself after the proscribed three days of non-washing that accompanies a perm are over, the fuzz goes away. However, if you wait until three weeks after the perm to have your hair washed again, particularly in this humid summer Iowa weather, your post-perm hair set is probably going to look a little haggard, and a lot fuzzy.
Guess who came in today, complaining about how fuzzy her hair has looked for the last couple of weeks? And that the bangs were okay for the first week, but that they'd been hanging down funny for the last two?
As I was washing her hair at the shampoo bowl, with the most powerfully-cleansing shampoo safely available for human use, I actually told her that God had obviously never intended for us to only wash our hair once every three weeks, or else he would have made us all French prostitutes. I don't think she really heard me, though. And as I was extremely gently washing her hair, despite my urge to scour her scalp with my acrylic talons -- really the only way to effectively remove the strata of hairspray and stale cigarette smoke without a razor and some shaving cream being involved somewhere-- I was admonished to be more careful, because she gets dizzy and all. Whatever. I then asked her why she wanted her hair washed at all, but I don't think she heard that either. Dude, she's 92* and vibrates like an iRocket on high speed. She doesn't really hear half of what I say.
And then she reminded me, for the thousandth time**, "Don't forget my rinse***. The Frivolous Fawn, you know."
As though, after all of this time, I could forget that after shampooing her hair, I have to stain her hair and my fingernails a nasty, extremely unnatural yellowy-brown color.
When all I want to really do is wrap my fingers around her scrawny little bird neck and put her out of my misery.
But I don't.
Instead, I nod, smile, tell her I didn't forget, and set her hair, keeping to myself that the only thing that saves her is that she only visits every couple or three weeks. For my luck she'd actually hear that if I said it out loud.
*The scariest part, by far, is that she can't fill out her own checks or sign her name because she shakes so hard. And she's been shaking that hard since I started doing her hair. Even scarier, if that's possible, is that she used to drive herself to the store in her own car. The greatest service the Iowa DMV has ever done for this state was to force her to be dependent upon taxicabs and buses as her sole means of transport.
**I am, of course, greatly exaggerating. If she only gets her hair washed and average of 30 times a year, it is, at most the 75th time she's reminded me.
***Little old women that are in denial about being gray, yet refuse to permanently color their hair, often rely on something called a 'rinse.' It is a nasty substance that adheres to the exterior of the hairshaft, making the hair unattractively dull, and some shade closely resembling mud, gold, orange, pink, powder blue, or lavender, depending upon rinse involved. They all have ridiculous names like White Minx, Plush Brown, and Chocolate Kiss.
