I slept in this morning. Glorious.
I did the 3-mile loop around Lake Johnson from about 4:15 until 5:00.
That isn’t me, or the lake I walked around, but it sure is purdy.
On the way home, I stopped at Great Clips at Avent Ferry and Western Blvd.
This is my third time there, I believe, and like the last time, it was close to closing on a weekend, and the same two stylists were working — a guy and a girl.
The guy is the one that cut my hair the last time, and is excruciatingly slow, and way too meticulous — as duly noted on March 29.
This time when I arrived, he was cutting the hair of a girl with long, brown hair that was down to about her shoulder blades. He did this about 8 times: flip her hair with his hand and let it fall, and each time, take about a half-inch wide area at the ends, and trim about an eighth-of-an-inch off it, because it hadn’t fallen “even.” This was so excruciating.
After that, right when he thought he had it pretty well “even,” (I’m thinking, at least), the mother of the girl walks up to her and says, “Baby, have him cut it a little bit shorter.”
Well, the stylist goes, “Oh no, we can’t start the haircut all over again. I’m nearly finished here.” And I thought, “Thank god, or there’d be at least another thirty minutes of getting the ends ‘straight.'” Then, he took that clothes protecting wrap off her, and I thought, “Finally.”
Well, he has her stand behind the chair, sort of out in the middle of the salon, and he does this flipping and trimming thing for about 5 more minutes — flip, minutia trim, flip, minutia trim, making sure that it’s straight not only when she’s sitting down, but when she’s standing up, too.
OMG, I thought I would lose it. I mean, what’s next? “Now run around the room, and stop mid-stride, and let me make sure it’s even. Now smile. Oh, those two strands jumped out of place.” Snip snip. ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!
And this time, I noticed something I hadn’t noticed last time, the other stylist was slow as molasses in January as well.
On top of that, it was Stylist-Get-On-Other-Stylist’s-Case-In-Front-Of-The-Customers Day.
When he finally called me, as I was next, he said, “Have a seat.”
As I stepped forward, the other stylist said, “Wait just a second while he cleans his station,” indicating the hair all around the seat on the floor from Miss Perfectly-Straight-As-Long-As-Her-Hair-Falls-In-One-Of-The-32-Ways-In-Which-He-Flipped-It-And-Trimmed-It‘s cut.
He looks at her like, “I can’t believe you just said that,” and then at me, and says, “Have a seat. I can cut around that.” I look at her, and then back at him, and he repeats, “Come on. Have a seat.”
<singing>Torn between two stylists, feelin’ like a fool…
My cut took longer than I wanted to, but it was a good cut. I asked for my standard “5 on the top, 3 on the sides,” and after he was done, he rubbed his hand along the sides of my head and said, “Are you sure you don’t want me to do a 4 right in here? That would blend it nicely from that 3 right up into that 5.” Meticulous.
“That would be great,” I said, wondering why they just wouldn’t do that anyway.
By the end, I was so ready to get out of there, that I handed him $12 to cover the $7.99 cut and a tip, and started turning to leave, when he said, “Just a second, so I can give you your $2.00 coupon.”
That other stylist, thinking she’d heard him say he was going to give me $2.00 off my cut, jumped in, “It’s the $7.99 special today, so that $2.00 off will make his cut $10.99, so it’s cheaper just to give him the special.”
Well, my stylist gives her the look, and says, “I have charged him $7.99; I’m talking about the coupon that prints out on his receipt that he can use the next time.”
She backed off, I took the receipt, and whispered to him, “Man, she’s all over your shit today.”
Dancing was fun tonight, but we didn’t start dancing until about 9:30, and stopped shortly after 10:30.
From about 8:45 until 9:20, Brigner had that huge fan, which had stopped working on Wednesday, out in the middle of the dance floor with the lights turned up so he could “work on it.”
He was trying to replace the fan belt through the grill cover. Well after 10 minutes, and accepting that that was never gonna happen, me, Van, and Michael started helping him take those almost-totally-stripped screws off.
After about the second one, I said, “Why don’t we get some pliers and loosen the nuts on the back of the screws instead. Ding.
So, when it was all said and done, it took 4 gay guys 45 minutes to do what one Lesbian would probably have done in 10 minutes. How butch.