Better Hair

So I left a message with my fav hair salon yesterday asking if they'd be interested in sponsoring me.  For salons this means, you know, free stuff.  I said I was thinking nails and maybeee Hair Extensions.  If anyone has seen Chris Rock's documentary "Good Hair" you know where this is going.

So I got a call back already this morning (unheard of!) and spoke with the most upbeat salon manager ever.  He was so great, said they'd love to sponsor me, take care of everything, and asked me to come in and talk about it.  So...three hours later I went in and talked about the pageant, what I could use from them, advertising that they'd get, etc., and he sent me over to an extensions consult.  Before he did that, he said he had to go and talk to the owner of the salon to talk about what they could offer me.  (Uh oh)

And this is the part where I am constantly digging from my backpack of Life Skills I've learned at Maggie's Place.  Life Skill #18: Keeping a Straight Face. 

So near the end of the conversation, incredibly nice and unassuming Hair Extensions girl says that the salon decided they can help me with 20% of the cost.  At this point, all has been lost...I've seen "Good Hair" twice now, I knew what was coming, and my intention was to find a way to do this for free or not at all.  But I had to ask anyway.  "So how much would this cost?" I asked.  And in the sweetest, matter-of-fact voice she replied "$895 dollars."

Un-zip the backpack
where is it
where is it
there it is

Straight Face.

Holy ?*@T!  People actually pay this amount of money every day, for hair.  "Better Hair" that is, not just Hair...because most of us all have hair right?!  Now you may be wondering, Kristin why were you so intersted in hair extensions anyway?  They are so inauthentic, fake, yada yada yada.  Well I've seen enough pictures of winners of pageants in the past 6 months to make me realize that long hair is iiiiiinnnnnn.  And for those of you who witnessed a traumatic hair cut last summer, you will understand how much I desire and miss my long hair in the first place.  So I thought, what the heck, right?  Wrong.

And now magically my hair looks longer in the mirror already.  I am very grateful for my hair, for the money in my bank account no matter how much or how little there is, and for my values and boundaries keeping me sane in a sometimes insane world.  

I mean, Eight Hundred and Ninety-Five Dollars!