Miss St. Louis

So I went to Fantastic Sams today to get my haircut. The stylist I saw when I entered was about my height, blonde, slightly chunky, and dressed sort of cutely in a cap sleeved T-shirt, khaki capris, and pink-trimmed Skechers sneakers.

"Does you need a hair cut?" she asked me, her oversized lips--whose size I just took notice of--flapping around like laundry in the wind as she fooled with her gold hoop earring while still managing to cut the hair of the boy in her chair at the time.

I am in for a ride, I thought. "Yes, yes I do."

"It will be about 40 minutes. She's the only one on, I am just taking my customers," the fat, older stylist on the other side of the room spat at me as I walked to my place in the waiting room. "Just so you know."

"Um, you told me it would 20 minutes on the phone when I call just five minute ago," I responded, referring back to the call I'd made upon deciding not to wait an hour at Great Clips.

"Well, you weren't here then," she said, waddling across the room like a duck, her straight-legged, cameltoed pants rubbing together something terrible. "All these people are in front of you."

And I bet they all just got here, too, right, you fat pig?, I thought. "Thanks!"

I swear, it was all I could do not to count the number of ghetto-isms the aformentioned big-lipped lady used while I was waiting, although none of them topped our conversation that occured while she was cutting my hair:

"So how is your day going?" I asked, trying to seem genuine and faking a smile.

"Girrl, I gots to watch 'Smart Medicine' tonight to avoid gettin' in a fight. One of my friends was doing some nasty shit and she's about to get hu' ass whooped," she said, frighteningly swirling the scissors around on her finger.

"Oh, that's nice," I responsed as every one of of the hairs on my head feared for its safety.

Despite all these black tendencies, a general country-ness shone through in her demeanor. Even her accent, which sounded eerily like a female version of the one Eminem uses in "8 Mile" had a bit of genuine white-trash midwesterner to it. And let's not forget the comment about that Lifetime show.

This woman seemed to be the perfect--and by perfect, I mean eerily balanced--marriage of trashy and ghetto, with a little bit of classiness built it, sort of dressed nicely and sort of pretty but not really enough to overshadow the trashiness or ghettoness.

And then it dawned on me: this woman is the personification of St. Louis.

Robert's bit of deep thinking for the day.

I'm off to bed. Ciao!