Lifting the Invisbility Cloak

Let's take a peek behind the matronly veil. Hair was felled. Gone! It feels good, sisters. Liberating. The woman who did the liberating, Michelle, cut Jessica Lange's hair for years. This salon is a tiny hole-in-the-wall right across the street from Garrison Keillor's book store. Be still, my celebrity-struck heart! But I remember the days when Jessica still lived in Minnesota (in a suburb straight down the street) and my friend Valerie--fresh from her own trim and foil at said salon--would sit at my kitchen table and report how she sat next to Jessica Lange: who read a magazine the entire time! Oh! She reads! It was one thing for Valerie to be giddy. She actually had some gen *u * ine star proximity. I got the shakes second-hand.

And above we see hints of orange and red visible in the Before Photo. This hair has chameleon-like qualities. Also note artwork with eerie matron-like qualities.

Back to Michelle. She told me how she used to participate in Locks for Love, the program where people got a free hair cut for donating ten or more inches of hair to make wigs for kids with cancer. Michelle got in a lot of trouble with that program. She chewed those hair volunteers right out. People showed up with bad hair they then wanted to donate for high quality wigs: uncut, under-conditioned, undernourished, split-ended, ugly, ICKY hair. Michelle felt those sick children deserved high-end hair, well cared for. So she still saves the really good hair--sleek, vitamin-buffed, pearly ended--to send to those poor children.

Look at the photo below. This is nice. See how steady the matron can hold a camera? And she was trying. But there is a hint of lift, of verve, of shimmy, to that hair. She could try again but appreciates the mystery of blur.

And while Michelle sighed with longing for the good stuff and clucked over the sheer nerve of the bad, pretending to be something pretty--she cut over a foot of the stuff off my head and threw it directly in the garbage.