BEAUTY SHOP TALK

by

Vicki Charmaine Bunch

Everybody in Axel is pulling down the shades and bolting all the doors.

When Linda Tripp got indicted, we breathed a sigh of relief and assumed snooping was dead. Just when we thought it was safe again to utter a discouraging word without reading a transcript of our conversation in Newsweek, we discover there are pictures on the Internet of college athletes videotaped in locker rooms without their permission.

Attorney Louis Goldstein, appearing on CBS This Morning a couple of weeks ago, explained that there is no legislative protection for invasion of privacy. Is that a camera peaking through the hole in the ceiling of the ratty restroom at your favorite dive? Who's lurking behind the mirror in the dressing room of that exclusive boutique? How many people have watched you picking your nose under the table at the Chamber of Commerce luncheon? There's no such thing as privacy!

Like an infant with no say-so over having his bare bottom photographed, like a naked zoo animal just standing there without any clothes, we are completely vulnerable to anybody who wants to take our picture when we least expect it. At home. Away. At work, rest or play. In a box with a fox. In a house with a mouse. Here or there. Anywhere.

Everyone in Axel is scandalized.

"I haven't took my underwear off in three weeks," said Tiny Mae Smith, owner of Beehive Bakery, after a hidden camera recorded her sticking her dirty finger in a chocolate fudge cake and licking off the icing. The cake was sold to poor Modesta Steptoe whose poodle died last month. Some malicious soul or neighborhood watchdog has been showing the video on cable access. Overcome with shame, Tiny Mae she changed her beauty shop appointment to 11:00pm and quit playing bingo.

Ivana Tubbs, fashion editor at the "Axel Rattler," got a horrible shock as she surfed the web recently. On a site called Babes in Latex was Ivana herself, stripped down to her grandmother's girdle--the rubber kind you can't buy anymore. She was in the dressing room at Lurlene's House of Style--she recognized the red flocked wallpaper--trying to stuff herself into a pair of size 6 cigarette pants which she lacked five inches getting zipped. "I'll never shop at Lurlene's again," she vowed in her last column. Then she moved to Wichita Falls.

The biggest scandal involves the Knights of Pythagoras who were taped at their secret initiation ceremony with two dancers from Krystal's XXX. Mayor Buddy Poteet was there, dressed in a flowing robe and a pair of Joe Boxer happy face shorts, along with Vice-Principal Vernon Wagstaff and Belle the beer drinking goat.

Thank goodness, Rev. Webb wasn't actually doing anything--unless you count hogging the bean dip. And we have come to expect disgraceful antics from Rep. Charley Smith, after his multiple arrests and the lengthy jail sentence he served during his term. But it was a terrible blow to the entire community to see the mayor, on his hands and knees, being ridden by Venus D. Miles.

It doesn't look like we'll get much privacy around Axel anytime soon.