BEAUTY SHOP TALK

by

Vicki Charmaine Bunch

It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as if grief could be lessened by baldness.

--Cicero

Happiness isn't everything: a hog is always happier than a man, and bacteria are always happier than hogs.

--Mencken

There's no place like home, which is why I'm here at Leon's Tally Ho, with a Suffering Bastard in one hand and a bottle of St. John's Wort in the other.

Either I have low blood sugar or I'm allergic to the fumes from my carpet. Or else it's that time of year when I get PMS for 5 months. A time when friends and neighbors scrawl things like "meatloaf" and "banana bread" on complex feeding charts and sit at my bedside reading aloud from Chicken Soup for the Soul.

My husband Sonny tries in vain to press a rat-tail comb into my pale limp hand. "Fix hair," he urges. But the thrill is gone.

You know what it's like. You go to the bookstore on the advice of your psychiatrist to buy The 1500 Funniest Jokes Ever Told and come home with Thus Spake Zarathustra. And the mindless radio ditty about a "drain doctor" that usually runs through your head 24 hours a day is replaced by the song they played on Ed Sullivan when the guy was spinning plates on a stick--guaranteed to land you in the psych ward.

Maybe it's too much caffeine, or too little. Maybe you need B12, or this weird herbal thing called Wort, or Midol.

Maybe it's menopause or adult-ADD. Or one of the other mysterious afflictions you've read about in hundreds of self-help books. You try acupuncture. You meditate, take up Tai Chi. You vow to become religious, to do good deeds, to help out at the snack bar at half-time.

Friends counsel you to keep on the sunny side, stop and smell the roses, count your blessings. The Book of Job comes to mind.

You wear a bathrobe and pad around in pink pig houseshoes, even on forays to the health food store to purchase Melatonin, B12 and the thing called Wort. You long for nothing so much as to be propped up in bed with the remote control and a lifetime supply of Snickers bars.

It's no consolation that Edgar Allen Poe went here, and Kafka, and the crazy guy who spends his days collecting bottles. You're utterly alone. The dame in the classic film noir, trapped in celluloid on the dark side of the street--the alley--the pier--the abandoned mine shaft. From a subterranean world, you recall the day your life went down the drain. When gossip, sex, and shopping lost their appeal.

One hundred sit-ups might make the endorphins kick in. A thousand jumping jacks. A slow walk around the block.

It's iron-poor blood. Too much junk food. Irregularity. Bad breath. Bad karma.

You wallow in it, like a germ-infested hog. You focus on it, dedicate your life to it--the misery, the angst, the delicious agony. You're Anna Karenina, Garbo, Carmen, waiting for the fat lady to sing.

The Wort beckons. Wallow or swallow? Express your opinion of the herbal cure by calling 817/595-6575. Results will be reported in a future column.