Last night I dreamed that I had a mullet. I tried to cut it, in the dream, while looking in the mirror. Some of the clippings fell onto my face and made a moustache. Great, now I have a moustache. A crappy one, too. A scraggly, sorry excuse for a moustache. Surprisingly, I looked like this man I’ve sometimes seen at my church. Need I say: a redneck man? No, I needn’t.
I had a mullet once, in real life. It happened while I lived in Logan, during my post-graduate work. I kept going back to the same stylist, Stephanie (is that a stereotypical stylist name? I think so. Much like Kimberly, Tiffany or Chrissy), for the same haircut, because that’s the kind of girl I am. I find something I like and because I’m not a prissy girl, I stick with it, too lazy and uncomfortable to branch out. The problem was that Stephanie couldn’t have a real conversation with me as she cut my hair and pay close attention to what she was doing. Never mind the inherent fact that stylists in general can’t have decent conversations, Stephanie was, at the very least, a stylist with whom I didn’t have to resort to the initial banal conversation required to get through a hair cut. She knew enough about me to make it so I didn’t have to engage in the silly pleasantries of a first meeting. And I knew enough pointless information about her.
So we’d talk about her daughters and her ridiculous boyfriend while she snipped the hair around my ears. We’d talk about my pathetic love-life as she took a bit off my ends. And we’d talk about my sorry love-life as she thinned my “layers.” And viola! A mullet. But I couldn’t tell for sure if it was a mullet. At least, not until I got home and styled it myself, which is to say, not styling it (how can I be as beautiful as I am EVEN though I never style my hair or wear make-up? It’s called natural beauty, folks. I have it, yes I do, heh heh heh. Beautiful even with a mullet, but that doesn’t mean I want one). And to be honest, it took a few months before it dawned on me what Stephanie had created through her constant, ignorant snipping.
Now, if I had gone into the salon and asked Stephanie to give me a mullet, I couldn’t blame her. I know that. But if I said “a little off the sides, trim the layers, blah blah blah,” then, isn’t it Stephanie’s responsibility to NOT give me a mullet? And if it’s starting to look like a mullet, doesn’t the burden of telling me that it’s beginning to resemble a mullet rest on her shoulders? I think so.
OR, say Stephanie wants to get rid of me. She’s sick of me as a client. Tired, oh so weary of hearing about my pathetic love life. What’s a stylist to do? A good way to get rid of a client is to casually, slowly give them a mullet. Each month, take off a little here, a little there. The next month, same thing. Gradually, the stylist shapes a mullet and is ultimately blameless. Right? That’s what happened with Stephanie and me. I’m not sure if she was hoping to lose me as a client, but it was inevitable. My friends had started noticing that I had a mullet—or at least, they didn’t protest when I joked about my mullet, and silence is a form of consent. And what can you do at that point? Change your stylist? I’m sure as hell not going to tell Stephanie that she needs to do something different—I have a mullet for pete’s sake! So I went to Derek, the male stylist who wanted to date me. Date my stylist? A bear’s ass!
Anyway, thankfully I no longer have a mullet, but maybe it’s time for a haircut.
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