COLIN HOGG
I’m thinking of writing a script for a movie I’m calling Finding Kay. It’s about a columnist in a popular women’s magazine who loses his longtime hairdresser when he moves to another city. Then, when he moves back to his old city and goes looking for her, the hairdresser isn’t where she used to be.
He can’t find her. He’s distressed. His hair hasn’t been the same since he lost her.
He writes a column about it and one of his readers replies and, even though the only clue he’d given was that the lost hairdresser’s name was Kay, the marvellous reader has a phone number and a name for the salon Kay’s working at now.
The columnist rings the salon, Kay answers, sounding like she was expecting to hear from him and why has he taken so long?
“Had you heard I was looking for you?” he asks her.
“Had I heard?” she says.
“A lot of people seem to read the Woman’s Weekly. Also,
I was sitting on the ferry to town, opened the magazine and read all about myself. Do you want an appointment?”
“Yes, please,” says the relieved columnist.
There’s a happy ending to the film, I think, but my appointment’s not until next week, so anything could happen.
I had found someone else to tangle with my hair in the meantime, Nina at a place up the road from where we’re living. She was good too, but she wasn’t
Kay, so I’m having to break off the new arrangement.
Which might be difficult because in the column I wrote about losing Kay, I might have said I’d found Nina.
I hope she understands, but I think hairdressers understand how dependent some of their clients become on their cutting ways, not to mention their interesting chat. I’m quite excited at the thought of catching up with Kay after so long, several years in fact.
I might have to get her to do something complicated so we’ve got more time. Maybe I’ll get my hair dyed or set, or have something done where I sit around with tinfoil on my head, drinking coffee and yakking.
I think I’ve always been sensitive about hairdressers. When I was a young reporter in Invercargill, the newspaper ran a story on the bleak future for men’s barbers. This was in the late 1960s, when young chaps like me were growing our hair long and ceasing to darken the doors of hairdressers as we used to.
I was asked to pose for the photograph that went with the story, showing me in the barber’s chair, looking nervous, with an angry barber standing behind me, holding his comb and scissors alarmingly close to my unkempt locks.
I seem to recall the barber’s name was Bob Hair, though I might have made that bit up.
He must have made me nervous because I don’t think I’ve let a man with scissors near my hair since. Though, these days, the styles have changed a bit.
The young chaps I see about town wear their hair short and cut in interesting shapes, and seem to darken the doors of barbers on a regular basis, which is how it goes, I suppose.
My only concern, really, is whether Kay remembers how my hair goes.