BEAUTY SHOP TALK

by

Vicki Charmaine Bunch

Scandal has hit Axel. Everybody who comes into the beauty shop is talking about the self-portrait of Vice Principal Vernon Wagstaff's hindquarters that got yanked from the Pretty Good Art Show on the square. Did the city art committee err by labeling it "a piece of filthy porn?" The VP argued that he had "a responsibility bigger than the State of Texas" to express his god-given talent.

With most of the art show dedicated to macaroni mosaics and face painting, the vice principal's avant garde expose' came as a shock to local art patrons. This should cause real artists to reflect on the consequences of casting pearls before swine.

History teaches that if you stifle creativity, it erupts in perverse ways--like weeds cracking the sidewalk or whiskers growing out of Mildred Fulweiser's upper lip. Axelites contend that caution regarding artistic expression is warranted. How do you tell a spurt of creativity from a spurt of perversion? There's resistance around here to new stuff--Karl Marx, fluoride, MTV. We think of Axel as the last bastion of normal Americanism, what with Baylor having dances now.

It's tempting just to give up and act regular. Usually one or two oddballs manage to emerge eccentric from that chain gang of conformity--high school. Are dreams what make them crazy or are dreams what make them cool?

Take twenty-five year old Leroy Spence, for example, the Michael Jackson of Axel. Sure, he could wear two gloves like everybody else--and this old world would be a pretty dull place indeed.

Small towns have a gracious tolerance for eccentricity. Saturday night they'll drag you off the porch and beat the tar out of you but Sunday morning, they'll miss you if you're not in church.

Face it. Most of you are just slinking through life, hoping nobody will notice you're alive. Whatever dreams you used to have were put on the back burner around 1965. You took mind-altering drugs--or got a lobotomy--to pare down the Magnificent Potential You into something less threatening to the average Republican.

Ninety-nine percent of this country's brain power has gone down the drain in just this way. Rigid conformity is tearing out the jugular of American ingenuity. Who's left to invent anything, except some weird-o out of touch with stringent social convention?

My grandmother, Chlorine Nedwalder, was the first one in Cobb County to wear the bullet bra and, for that, she had to move out of town. Years later she staged a triumphant return to Axel as the star of Bert's Bubble Bath Ballet, a traveling vaudeville act. Everyone was still just as jealous and catty as ever. After the bubble dancers left, Axel just slumped back down to its comfort zone of mediocrity.

Another famous Axelite was Johnny Bono who, I am proud to say, was in shop class with my husband Sonny. In high school Johnny was what you might call a thug--with ducktails and a pack of Kools rolled up in the sleeve of his T-shirt. He was always getting licks for wearing taps on his shoes. But, man, could he dance.

Johnny Bono left Axel on the reform school bus in 1969 and the next time we heard anything about him was a couple of months ago. His mother brought his picture--in the National Inquirer--to the Assembly of God church. Johnny the Hood lives on a gator farm in Louisiana now and eats live crawdads in a popular carnival sideshow.

There's slim pickens when it comes to famous people from Axel.

Which brings us back to Vice Principal Wagstaff's rear nudal self-portrait. I'm sorry to say ol' Vernon compromised his aesthetic vision by painting pants on his picture. The controversial work of art was purchased for eleven dollars by Roy Ellsworth of Roy's Big and Tall to be used in an ad for big pants. The almighty dollar wins again.

So much for artistic integrity.