Fooled

Maybe it's my age, having lived looooong but today I was caught completely unawares at my hairdresser's. I think I wrote about her place before. An old Victorian house in St. John's. All artifacts preserved, fire places, chandeliers, crown mouldings. A darling place with stairs running everywhere and the best atmosphere.

Every six months they mix up all the cutters and stylists and colourists, give them new work stations in different rooms in the house, match them up with those they haven't worked with before.

"Keeps us all fresh," says Bernice my faithful stylist. She's a gift, took me from hair to the waist to a smooth bob that lasts and lasts. You find a good cutter you stick with her/him.

So now she's been matched with this absolutely outrageous stylist for 6 months. I think my jaw dropped when I cast eyes on her for the first time today. Breddie, her name sounded like. Breddie was dressed in an absolutely wild purple and orange mini-dress revealing much of her body. Bright red pumps with 6" heels. Piercings with hardware all over her face including her mouth and nose. Matching colourful tattoos featuring wild flowers covered both her legs, her arms, her breasts and her neck. Her dyed blonde hair with purple streaks swung to her waist festooned with yellow bits and bobs. And one long ostrich feather of emerald green. I took her for an out of control 19 year old.

"Breddie's a card," laughed my stylist who's in her mid forties and dresses soberly in black with sensible work heels and a soothing manner.

Well, thought I grouchily, "card" would be a massive understatement in my book. I can just see the drug den and the biker boyfriend and their lives of dodgy cop avoidance.

An older woman toddled in and sat in Breddie's chair and proceeded to ask her for the wedding photos from the weekend. Whose wedding, thought I, surely Breddie and her criminal dimwitted druggie biker wouldn't be invited to anyone's weddinge

So Breddie hauls out her Iphone and treats the four of us in the room to HER wedding pictures at a pricey well known golf club. In white. All tats under wraps. All hardware removed. Criminal Biker Boy is in a black tux and a perfect hairdo with not a tat or a piece of metal or leather or hairy armpits in sight.

And the killer shot? Their two little flower girls scattering blossoms at their feet as the bride and groom kiss.

Their daughters, five and three years old.