At the hairdresser's

Women, we are surely the stronger sex. Do you know of any man who would willingly subject himself to lethal chemicals and the indignity of rolling one's hair with curlers wrapped with cheesecloth in order to sit under a hot machine like a piece of toast for an hour, and then pay someone for the privilege? Granted, the hairdresser's had Internet terminals for me to freely use during those three hours, but I couldn't help wondering what on earth possessed me to undergo the process of my own free will. Surely it was not sadistic vanity?
"We'll make it look really natural," the hairdresser had said. I looked at his leather pants and goatee and decided he might not be the right person to point out that a perm, by definition, would not be natural looking in any event.
"OK," I said.
"Do you want to have a digitising perm or a setting perm?" he asked. Drat. What on earth could that mean?
"Erm, I think I don't know what you are talking about," I said. He smiled, then explained every thing - only it still didn't really mean much to me. I shrugged and said I wanted a normal perm.

A little girl came in with her primly dressed mother. She climbed on to the chair opposite mine with much anticipation. Through strands of my own hair I saw that her long black hair was being pinned up into huge curlers. She pouted her lips for her mother to apply lip gloss. Do little girls have to dress up these days too? I hoped she wasn't going to a friend's birthday party - the thought of many little girls like her getting their hair curled for the day was too much for an anti-dressing up person like me to bear. Her mother carefully curled her eyelashes as the girl pushed her face forward towards her.

Next to me, a bride was sullenly flipping through the latest edition of Vogue while waiting for her hairdresser to finish tying her hair up in a bun for the veil. This was the most laborious process - first her hair was curled with big rollers, then they smoothed it out to tie it at the nape of her neck while braiding the sides. She sneezed as her hairdresser covered her hair with hair spray. I suddenly had an image of my hair looking as big as hers had been after they'd undone the rollers.
"I don't want my hair to look big," I said to my hairdresser. He smiled again.
"Trust us, we're professionals. We don't do big hair," he said. The assistant yelled to someone down her microphone that she wanted a setting machine. Two young girls brought in what looked like something salvaged from the original Star Trek series set - I was sitting under two huge hula hoops with lights on them.
"You can sleep under this," the assistant said. But the hula hoops were emanating heat, and I did not want to accidentally touch them. I was glad when they brought a different machine for the second part of setting my hair - it was the more typical hooded shape suspended above me which made me feel less vulnerable. Even hairdresser's are too high-tech for me to deal with these days, it seems.

"I've got curly hair now!" I nearly shouted at M. down the phone. "I'll bet you can't wait to see it!"
"How curly is it?" M. asked. Maybe he thought I'd gone and got myself a 'fro.
"It's fairly curly," I said. "But everyone likes it. Even my sister."
Actually, my dad had clucked his tongue when I'd told him how much it had cost.
"If you were to pay that much anywhere in the world you'd get a good hair style," he had said.