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INTERVIEW WITH CHRISSY SNOW RIGHT AFTER INTERVIEW WITH SHAE D. DAVIDSON

Interview with Shae D. Davidson

Interview with Chris Snow

MY REAL LIFE HAIR RAISER
by Ken Leavoy

Back when I in my early 20’s I used to spray a product on my hair called “Sun-In” It promised blonde highlights when you applied heat, either from direct sunlight or by drying the crap out of your hair with a blow dryer. I had always been happy with the results. Soft blonde highlights on hair the texture of straw. What more could a guy ask?
One morning, after working a midnight shift at HoJo’s restaurant, I went to the local hair salon for a cut. I had been awake for a very long time and had not eaten much over that time span, which will be of more relevance shortly. After cutting my hair, the stylist suggested she could highlight my hair for me. “Why not”, I thought, I’d liked what I was able to achieve at home, so just imagine how great it will look when done by a professional? What a mistake!

The stylist applied the colour to select areas and then under the infamous hair dome I went, to let it set in, while browsing through old Glamour magazines. When she rinsed it off and dried my hair, what I saw in the mirror was not pretty. There was a large patch of orange hair down the middle of my head. On the left side of my head, there was another orange area while the opposite side had a much smaller area of orange.

When the stylist asked me what I thought of it, I told her it wasn’t quite what I had expected. I pointed out to her how one side had more colour than the other side, to which she said “That’s the beauty of this look, it doesn’t have to match”. I paid her and left the salon.

Two ladies were getting out of a car in the parking lot engaged in conversation. They both looked at my hair in an odd manner and stopped talking mid-sentence . “Beauty my ass” I thought as I ran home.

One look in the mirror at home and I knew I was in trouble. How the Hell was I going to go to work looking like this?? I called the salon. The stylist told me they had been talking about me and to please come back so they could fix my hair. With baseball cap firmly planted on my head, I raced back.

By this point I had been awake for a very long time and still had an empty belly. The stylist now applied colour over all my hair, since attempting to correct just the messed up spots would be virtually impossible. After another lengthy session under the dome of shame, it was time to reveal the results.

This time my entire head of spiky hair was a very brilliant yellow colour. “Big Bird yellow” is how I have described it over the years. The last thing I recall was the stylist remarking that this was “close to my natural colour”. The next thing I knew I awoke in an ambulance with two cute attendants looking over me. I had a seizure in the salon, had slid right out of the chair and was doing a flopping fish-out-of-water impression, so they called for help.

I rested a while at the hospital and when I woke there was an oriental doctor who had an afro, looking over me. He asked if I had slept much. I said no. He asked if I had eaten anything lately. Again, I said no. Then he asked if anything had happened to perhaps make me angry, to which I said “Hello? Look at my hair”. His broken-English reply? “Oh you hair alright to me” Tears gathered in my eyes, this guy wasn’t exactly an authority on hairstyles. He gave a prescription and I haled a taxi to take me to the pharmacy.

I was a bit surprised at how rapidly the pharmacist came over to me as I approached the counter with my prescription. “I’ll fill this right away” he remarked, looking like he’d just seen a ghost. As luck would have it, a girl I worked with at the time was in the pharmacy. She saw me and ran over asking “Kenny, WHAT HAPPENED??” “Oh hi Elaine” I replied solemnly, “Ya, I know, my hair is a mess eh?” “Yes your hair is funny looking Kenny, but what happened to your face?” Elaine asked. My face? What the Hell was she talking about? I glanced up at one of the store’s surveillance mirrors. Not only did I have the spiky Big Bird hair, my face was also covered in little red spots (no doubt caused by the seizure.) No damn wonder the pharmacist was quick to get to me, I’d be afraid to have me in the store too.

Elaine kindly gave me a ride home and some follow-up tests a few weeks later concluded that I was not epileptic or anything like that. My body was tired, weak and pissed-off and just couldn’t take it anymore. I made one final visit to that salon a day or two later, where they tamed the colour to something that didn’t look like a Jim Henson creation.

From that day forward, I’ve stuck to doing-it-myself when it comes to hair colouring and I’ve never passed out afterwards or awoke to hunky ambulance attendants brushing my forehead and telling me I was going to ok. No one’s cute enough to go through that for again.

POSTED: SEPT. 20, 2010


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