BEAUTY SHOP TALK

by

Vicki Charmaine Bunch

Ever since my picture ran in the Rattler, long lost loves have been crawling out the woodwork, hanging around the beauty shop, getting peanut shells on the floor.

Fame is a seductive thing. "Venomous victory," I called it, when I won the Axel Race for Dates in 1969 and the five guys I was going steady with found out about each other.

"You think you're hot snot," they said, and I did.

Branded a social outcast, I had to invite my cousin Willard to the junior prom.

When Fate smiles at you, take an aspirin and go to bed.

As a member of MENSA, I've been paying close attention to the announcement of the 1996 Nobel Prize recipients by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Average everyday eggheads like you and me, slaving over a strain of DNA, they get THE CALL. The call that says, "Now your colleagues will hate you."

The winner's regular friends--the ones she bowls with--think, "Well, Madame Curie's getting a little too big for her britches," and quit inviting her over to watch Jeopardy.

Meanwhile, the guy who had the Bunsen burner next to hers in freshman chemistry--the guy who always set his hair on fire--appears out of nowhere with a scheme to make beer out of used tires. And the stock broker from a fancy firm--who mistook the laureate for a valet at her sister's wedding--calls her on his Porche phone to discuss her portfolio and invite her to Monte Carlo for the weekend.

All of a sudden, Dr. Genius is hot snot. A babe magnet with irresistible dipole force.

An Important Message to Nobel Prize Winners: DON'T WIND UP LIKE ELVIS.

Don't wind up in a spandex jump suit throwing sweaty scarves to fans.

Do you want to find yourself in a pile of broken Erlenmeyer flasks with a bad hangover? Unrestrained merrymaking is fraught with peril for the scientist. Look at these case histories:

A group of chemists leave chairs at prestigious universities to start a band called the Doped Metalloids.

A winner of the Nobel Prize for Fungus is found facedown in a petri dish.

A chemist, offered a Mai Tai by a jealous colleague, drinks sulfuric acid.

Rival physicists bombard one another with electrons, split each other's atoms, and get annihilated.

As someone who is practically a genius myself, I feel their pain. I know their sublimation, their molality, their enthalpy. Stardom hits and, before they know it, they can't even balance an equation.

Scientists are extra vulnerable to Fame's intoxication because, generally speaking, they haven't partied much. To them, nertia is the opposite of inertia, acid is the opposite of base, and the probe is an tool for dissection.

Let us never forget D'Alphonse Fontaine, founder of the Axel Genius Society. When he won Cobb County's highest academic honor, the Academy Award for Physics, in 1953, it went to his head. He disappeared during the Fontaine Day parade and came to three days later at the wheel of a pick-up truck loaded with TNT, barreling down a winding mountain road in Tennessee.

Would you rather be remembered like Enrico Fermi, Max Planck and Niels Bohr or reviled like Fontaine? The IQ of a wasted Nobel Prize recipient is reduced to the cube root of a slug brain. After his downfall, Fontaine never accelerated a single particle.

Wake up, Brainiacs! You're already way cooler than everybody else cause you get to use ray guns and robots and stuff. You can clone fine chicks and freeze yourself for future life.

Why do you need to party? Science groupies will suck you dry as a locust's exoskeleton and dump you for next year's trophy brain.

My advice is SIMMER DOWN. Stick to your monotonous routine as much as possible, avoid chills, and drink plenty of fluids. Trick the death cell.

When wheeler dealers and ne'er-do-wells show up on your doorstep, don't invite them into the lab for Ding Dongs and helium. Don't flash your photons in public like a two-bit whore. Dumb down. Act regular. Don't wind up like the King.