BEAUTY SHOP TALK

by

Vicki Charmaine Bunch

Summer. Time for family reunions and potato salad chock full o' deadly bacteria. Time for lazy afternoons in the park with a can of mosquito repellant and an ice chest packed with beer. Time for choosing up sides and getting knocked unconscious when it's Grandpa's turn at bat.

Time to bury the hatchet. Let bygones be bygones. Start with a clean slate. Right?

In every sibling relationship there's a lot of give and take. My sister gives my husband Sonny a big juicy kiss on the lips. I take her car keys and throw them in the lake.

I give up my Saturday to cook for the Nedwalder family reunion. My sister takes all the credit. I give her a piece of my mind. She takes one of the coconut cream pies and eats it on her way out the door.

Every June the years of resentment boil to the surface. I obsess about the time she got barbecue sauce on my baby blue Capri pants. The time she devoured all the deviled eggs before I could put them on the buffet. The time she got drunk and set the picnic table on fire. And who got blamed? Me, of course, even though I hadn't set a fire in years. It isn't fair.

All my sister cares about is convincing our relatives she's better than me. There's always this competition. I wear my hair in a six inch beehive--guess who shows up with a twelve inch beehive? I'm elected treasurer of the Axel PTA--she embezzles $3,000 from the Wynetta PTA. I save a poodle from drowning--she rides across I-30 on a unicycle to rescue a raccoon.

Family reunions are the worst. She makes sure she has the fastest car. The lowest-cut blouse. The loudest boom box. I'm a full-grown woman. I can handle put-downs. But I feel like screaming when she pits her overdeveloped daughter Ashley against my precious, innocent Destinee. If Destinee makes an A on her report card, Ashley makes A+. If Destinee gets a date to the prom with a senior, Ashley goes to a bar with some guy old enough to be her father. If Destinee's picture appears in the Axel Rattler, Ashley's is in the National Enquirer. [qc]

"Ashley is president of our local Britney Spears [qc] Fan Club," my sister says. "Ashley's hair is the same color as Elizabeth Dole's. A man on the escalator at Montgomery Wards said Ashley should be a model." Brag, brag, brag.

It's inner beauty that counts. Inner beauty and good citizenship and being built like a Baywatch babe. If a fight is what my sister wants, it's a fight she's going to get. I'm putting the final touches on my multi-media presentation "Destinee Bunch: All-American" just in time for the reunion. It's a 45 minute video, accompanied by two guys playing banjos.

It starts with Destinee blowing out her candles on birthdays 1-15. Next she's playing a dinosaur in the third grade play and crying at the funeral of her hermit crab. There's Miss Tippy Toes' tap dance troupe performing at Mayfest. And cheerleader tryouts and Destinee's mime routine for the Junior Miss Pageant. Then the banjo players set off a lot of fireworks.

That's my cue to show everybody the "future" Destinee I made by cutting pictures out of magazines and gluing her face to them. The future Destinee models for Victoria's Secret, marries Ricky Martin and wins on Wheel of Fortune.