Hair, nails, adventure, and swirl

Got the hair washed, blown out, and flat ironed by the inexpensive hairdresser down the street, my emergency back-up to marvelous Matin. Got my nails done in Gellish OPI hot pink, forgoing the massage to save time. I'll look like a polished doc at the big pharma audition, after all. The best part is that the hair and nails should carry through to all my important events next week. My spa-like nail emporium charges an extra $2 for OPI polish, which is supposed to last longer. A win-win, I like to think.

My mini adventure this afternoon included this: I showed up at the hairdresser's door, unannounced. She wasn't there, but she ran in from a couple of doors away when she saw me knocking on the door to her tiny shop. She said she could take me: "Come back in 20 minutes." I did. Then, when I returned, she was eating a lavish junk food dinner at her tiny overstuffed desk, piled high with magazines, and she said she wasn't ready. I sat outside and looked at my handheld for a bit. Then, when I came back and she was almost done with her corndog and chips, she directed me to her mother's hair salon a few doors away, because, she said, there was no hot water at her own salon. It had been that kind of day for her. So, off we went, to her mother's shop. But, still, I had to wait outside for another ten minutes while this hairdresser finished doing laundry at the laundromat between the two shops. She never has any towels ready, for some reason. Then, I finally, and gratefully, got my hair washed, and the two women in her mother's shop were about to uncork a bottle of white wine, a gift from the client. I was offered a glass, but turned it down, afraid it would slow my game. Off we went back to my hairdresser's shop again. So, there I was, walking along the boulevard, hair wet and in a towel, body covered in a plastic sheet! 
As we walked, my hairdresser asked, "Did you see the little woman at the shop, about to do the other lady's hair? That's my mom!" The little woman is almost as tiny as my own mother, under 5 ft. tall. My hairdresser is a woman of size (we were watching Melissa McCarthy on the CW, too, as she blew out my hair), so, that was surprising. Then, she told me something I would never have guessed: that her mother was from a Central American country. Says the hairdresser: "My dad (deceased) was Irish and Scottish, and I'm the only white person in my family."

I told her about the great word I recently learned from the youth for people of mixed heritage, otherwise known in casting as "ethnically ambiguous." The word is "swirl."