Smokey Mountain Breakdown

My friend Scott is just a wee bit vain. Not in a way that is annoying , but the way that men of a certain age get. It's adorable, really.

Having grown up with a father who was color blind and whose clothing was uniformly khaki, blue and sometimes yellow, these little peccadilloes sometime strike me as amusing. My father was always meticulously groomed, and his clothing seemed to have nothing that could get him in trouble with color. Nothing in shades of red or green. We also have nothing of male pattern baldness in my family, so the hair thing was never something I could wrap my head around.

My reaction to bad toupees has gotten me in trouble on a number of occasions. I think balding looks just fine. I don't see anything wrong with it. On most men, it's very attractive. But, unless one has invested in one of the expensive lace-front toupees, like the ones I used to work with...toupees look bad. Comb-overs are an abomination.

Scott's vanity seems to be attached to his hair and sometimes his face. He has lovely wavy brown hair that he keeps cut short with the top a bit longer. It really is his crowning glory so I can't blame him for being a bit proud of it. He's a handsome man and I understand wanting to maintain that. So, he uses a little hair dye to cover the bits of distinguished silver that shows on his temples.

But, in true Friend Scott fashion, he keeps encountering disaster.

He gets those little boxes of Clairol from The Dollar Store. He usually does such a good job that even I don't notice it. But this one time, he comes in my driveway wearing a cap. Scott never wears caps.

He marches into the house and removes the cap with a flourish.

His hair is Annie Lennox orange. Ginger pussy cat orange.

I feel the air dry my mouth out as my jaw hangs open.

"Scott...what have you done?" I say in a half whisper.

Well, as it turns out, someone tampered with the hair color boxes at the dollar store, switching all the products in the boxes. Scott doesn't find this out until he goes into the Sally Beauty Supply to beg for help.

After laughing at him, the sales girl says, "Oh, you must be one of the folks who got the hair color at the Dollar Store."

They sell him some Metalex and the correct shade of dye to get his hair back to it's proper shade of brown.

Then, he visits another time and I notice that his face is sort of puffy. I wonder if he's having an allergy attack. I hadn't seen his face look like that since the last time he helped me load some hay in. It was oddly smooth and sort of like what my face does when I'm on mega doses of steroids.

I didn't want to say anything, but I sure was thinking, "Gee, what's wrong with your face?"

Turns out, he'd found someone to shoot him up with bootleg botox.

And he loves it.

Like I said....I didn't want to say anything. So I kept my mouth shut and prayed that the disturbing telepathy thing we have developed would not betray me.

So...the last and most recent episode involved him going into one of the local "Curl up and Dye's" in town for a bit of pampering. He was just going to get his hair color touched up and his eyebrows waxed. I was relieved that he was going into see a professional.

I'm not sure what happened in there. It sounds like the procedures started to snowball. He got way more body parts waxed than I think he originally intended. But his hair...well, his hair ended up being sort of black with dark red highlights. Sort of dark maroon, I guess.

And his eyebrows. Well, they came out vaguely Norma Desmond-ish, if you know what I mean.

He went back in a few days later to get the hair color fixed.

The eyebrows ...well, we are still waiting for those to grow out. He'll be ready for his close-up in another month or so.