The Wal*Mart Beauty Salon: A Hairy Experience or Just a Good Deal?

I love oxy morons. Jumbo shrimp. Plastic silverware. Just wars. Butthead. Clogged drain. And who would have thought I would have another to add before we started the RV trip – let alone an oxy moron I could actually walk in to. Yes ladies and gentlemen, I am talking about the Wal*Mart Beauty Salon.

But first, we need to talk about hair. Let’s be real. Does anyone like their hair? Too thin, too thick, too straight, too curly, wrong color. Very few people I have met will honestly say, “Yes, I like my hair.” Certainly not me. While other girls would brush their hair for hours, I never had enough mass to keep me busy for more than a minute or two. While other girls would take a hair band and wrap it around their pony tails twice, mine would go around my thin little strands 4 times and then still fall out. Every hairdresser since I was 12 (when I first started going to hair dressers – prior to that it was a bangs cut and trim in the kitchen) acts like they are giving me new, vital, secret information by letting me know in a hushed voice, “honey, you have thin hair.” Well, at least there is one thing thin on my body.

I remember my father making a comment to me somewhere in my early teens about my hair and then making the jump to his mother…old cue ball. More fodder for future nightmares: Bald by the age of 20. Luckily, I really don’t care. And as a person who is not particularly fussy about her outward appearance and has trouble passing up a swimming opportunity, having my thin hair is, in some ways, a blessing. My hair dries really fast.

Every once in a while Evan and I have little conversations about how lucky the other one is because they married someone who comes with some obscure special skill that they didn’t realize before the vows were taken. Evan, for example, is The Coupon Guru. When ever we arrive in a new place, which is quite often in the past 7 months, he is going through the free newspapers and circulars that are at the front of the local grocery stores that everyone else walks right by. He finds all sorts of 2 for 1 restaurant deals, internet deals, and special deals for families living in RVs with red headed boys, bald husbands and thin haired wives. My added bonus that I brought to the marriage is that I don’t spend money on my looks. “Just think how much money we have saved over the past 14 years because I am low maintenance in the beauty department!”

Since we have been homeless I have had my hair cut twice. Once in Dillon, Montana in late October for $24 by a nice chatty hairdresser named Cheryl who told me way too much information about her relationship with her husband and a second time last week in Scottsdale, AZ.

We were visiting my Mom who is a new arrival to the area and has yet to find a hairdresser she likes. Mom and I had a couple of hours to kill and Mom, as only a mother can, let it be known in her most gentlest of ways, that it was time for me to get my hair cut. Yes, my 76 year old mother still mothers her 47 year old baby. I guess it never ends.

So there we were. Driving the strip malls of the Happy Valley – just north of North Scottsdale and coming up empty on the Beauty Salon front. I spy a Sally’s Beauty Supply shop which I figure might be a good place to do some reconnaissance / information gathering -- get some reliable information from people in the know. I pull up and leave the car running and jump out. There is a long line at the cash register of relatively coiffed women who I figure are locals. I decide to treat the long line of women as if they have gathered there just for me and put out the general question: “Excuse me women, I am new to the Scottsdale and looking for a place to get my hair cut, does anyone have any suggestions in the area?” A woman with jet black hair and many boxes of hair products in her basket takes the bait and says, “There is Roxy’s across at the mall or Wal*Mart next door. Roxy’s is pretty pricey and you need an appointment.”

Back in the car I lay out the options to Mom. No choice. We pull into Wal*Mart. Now, I have used Wal*Mart on and off for a lot of things over the past 7 months on the road trip. I have slept in their parking lots in Kansas, Wyoming, South Dakota and North Dakota. I have eaten their food, worn their clothes, decorated the interior of the RV for Christmas all with Wal*Mart products. And now I am about to go under the Wal*Mart knife…um, scissors. A new form of Wal*Mart Baptism. Is the next step to go to the Wal*Mart Tattoo Parlor and have their logo put upon my inner arm? Or perhaps go to City Hall and change my name to Wendy Wal*Mart? When does it end? I am thinking of the red and white barber pole in front of the barber shop at the Golder’s Green Tube station where the boys and Evan would make their pilgrimage every 6 weeks or so and how the red and white stripes represents the bloodletting that was the primary function of past barbers – the local surgeons. The white stripe was the white bandage used before the bloodletting and the red stripe for the bandage used after the bloodletting.

We enter the beauty salon portion of Wal*Mart. Yes, there are two beauticians available right now. Right next to each other. We are lucky, the woman at the front lets us know. On Saturday at 12 noon there is usually a line out the door. Mom’s beautician is male, has a wild black Mohawk and stinks of cigarettes. My beautician is a chatty Korean woman and our conversation is mostly about kimchi and how you either love it or hate it.

We emerge 30 minutes later with matching hair do’s for $17.95 a piece for a wash, cut and blow dry. The experience, like my thin hair, is less hairier then expected.