BEAUTY SHOP TALK

by

Vicki Charmaine Bunch

Every magazine is running a Top 100 list. I've been trying to come up with one. The 100 Greatest Cookie Recipes of the 20th Century? The 100 Most Ruthless Dictators? The 100 Worst Smells? The problem is thinking of a hundred things. The easy lists--The 100 Cutest Animals, for example--are too obvious to make an attention grabbing article.

I would do Best Jokes like GQ, except I can only remember one joke. This is it. What did the bald man say when he was given a comb? "Thank you. I shall never part with it." A hair joke. Lots of people don't get it. I guess it's an inside joke--hairdressers only.

Anyway, a list with 100 things is 99 too many. It's a cop-out. Who is the most glamorous star of the century? Marilyn Monroe or Liz Taylor or Rita Hayworth or Greta Garbo? Can't decide? Then include them all.

The shorter you make a list, the tougher it is. Hence, my list--the sexiest man of the 20th century.

Troy Donahue springs instantly to mind. I fell for him during an all-night junk food orgy when I was twelve. My mother let me stay up late in my baby doll pajamas to watch A Summer Place. Her way of teaching me about the birds and bees. Sandra Dee plays the daughter of the man with whom Troy Donahue's mother is having an affair. The tide comes in and Sandra has to stay in a cave with Troy all night without a chaperone. Nothing happens but her mother doesn't believe her and makes her an appointment with a gynecologist. Eventually something must happen, however, because Sandra Dee gets pregnant. What a player! Troy Donahue was the sexiest man alive.

I learned more about love from movies like How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. Even today beach party movies get me in the mood for a weenie roast. My friends and I drooled over Frankie Avalon and the aloof muscle men who muscle in on surfers' turf in Muscle Beach Party. We squealed like piglets when we saw Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and A Swingin' Summer with Gary Lewis and the Playboys. We wanted to volunteer for Bob Cummings research into the mating habits of teenagers in Beach Party.

I don't know when I turned into a two-faced bitch. My preteen heart-throb Troy showed up again in Palm Springs Weekend but it just wasn't the same. Troy was bad but not bad enough. I realized that I was different from my gum-popping girlfriends. I started sneaking around at night--frying up baloney sandwiches and watching slutty 50's flicks while my parents slept. I began to pattern my life after the tough teens in movies like Teenage Devil Dolls, Teenage Crime Wave, Teenage Delinquents, and Teenage Bad Girl. Smoking, cussing, wearing chains. It was preparation for my married life.

Like white gloves and petticoats Amy Locane who falls for bad boy Johnny Depp in John Waters' Cry-Baby, I got swept off my feet by a juvenile delinquent. I'll never forget the day I saw him stealing the statue of Millard Fillmore from Fillmore Junior High. The next thing I know, he's stealing my heart. And my purse. Sonny awakened the hellcat in me the way goody-two-shoes Troy never could. I would trade fifty champagne sipping squares from the country club set for one reprehensible miscreant.

The sexiest man of the century? That's easy--Johnny Depp. But Sonny's sexy too.