BEAUTY SHOP TALK

by

Vicki Charmaine Bunch

My skunk stripe customer, Star, is deep and tragic and middle-aged. She has the annoying habit of speaking with a made-up German accent. She wears nylon hair extensions and fake fingernails.

She knows how many grams of fat are in the orange nut muffins at Luby's and the real names of soap opera stars. She bores the hell out of a lot of people and is tormented by the fear that shopping at Frederick's twice a month isn't enough to keep her husband Earl in a marriage characterized by fur balls and bad cooking.

On the eve of her fortieth birthday, she's busting at the seams to be thought of as a sex object. She believes in premonitions, reads her horoscope, is haunted by the ghost of her exotic dancer past.

"It's not what you got," Earl reassures her. "It's how you use what you got."

Earl's an expert at making the most out of slim prospects. A county road kill inspector, he parlayed his $350 a month paycheck into a booming ferret raising enterprise.

The thought of losing Earl to a young, beautiful ferret customer scares the bejeebers out of Star. At the same time, like a lot of us gals, she's not content tending ferrets all day long.

"Life's got to mean more than this," she mutters, taking a drag off a cigarette, as I try to volumize what was left of her hair after her bee hive froze and fell off during last week's ice storm. (She got her negligee caught on a barbed wire fence and was out in the weather for several hours.)

She thumbs through a soap opera magazine looking for hair-dos.

"Honey, what you need is the post-mod look," I say. "It'll make you feel like you're sixteen again." Sixteen's the apex of life.

"This time a new hair-do isn't going to cut it," Star says, lighting another cigarette.

Even I'm stumped, and I get paid to give advice on how to keep a man. What's left that Star hasn't already tried? She's had so many free make-overs, they won't let her in the mall. She vibrated her thighs every day for nine weeks at Body by Brian and only lost a quarter inch. She even took ventriloquism classes at the junior college.

I open up the latest issue of Axel Style, and it hits me right between the eyes. Sub-molecular blubber melting, tattoo removal, and facial relocation are all safe and effective means of salvaging the pitiful remnants of a woman's self-respect. Anybody who can afford to whack away at herself (and Star can, thanks to Ferret Fun and Furs)--and doesn't--has got to be lazy or just plain chicken.

"Any day Earl will wake up and throw you out like yesterday's ferret litter," I warn. "Every woman in Axel is your rival for that fabulous hunk of man."

Star ogles the photos of Axel's beautiful people--particularly Candi Buckley, the ceiling fan heiress. "Do you think she's had a boob job?" she asks, a teardrop in her eye.

DO DOGS LIKE TAMALES?

"Cheer up," I say. "Call several of the doctors in this magazine. Look--there are four or five ads on every single page."

In a couple of months, Star will be an exciting beauty but, don't worry, she'll still be the same old Star. She'll still know how much fat is in a pretzel, the stars of daytime TV, and a few off-color jokes.

Earl would be off his rocker to stray from the hen house!