From the salon to the fitting room: Nelson finds his voice

For the past weeks, Nelson has mainly been a passive learner, observing the pros and learning the ropes at Podiatry.  But as he gets more on the job experience, he is becoming a deeper character.  This is finally shaping up to be the performance art piece I intended.  Before I explain Nelson's recent character development, allow me to provide some insight into the real-life experiment from my past that inspired this current one.

Unlike many human beings, especially female southerners, I do not have a particular person to whom I go when I fancy a trim of the hair.  I've been a haircut-hopper all my life, and as a youngster, it wasn't so bad.  However, I discovered as an adolescent the hideous social torture that is the haircut experience if you don't happen to be an extremely outgoing, whore-for-gossip equipped with hours of insane stories to recount to your necessarily hip, young, gossip-hungry hairstylist.

This awkwardness reached its peak when I was an undergrad as initial small talk revealed that I was a college-aged lady, AKA a perpetually drunk, sexual fiend whose downtime was split between going to frat parties in which gallons of communal "punch" was served, doing it with anyone who would have me, and attending mass gatherings of similarly-aged youth in serendipitously abandoned warehouses.  When the succeeding 5 minutes of conversation proved that I was none of those things, rather a philosophy major with nothing exciting to reveal (except perhaps for the revolutionary bouleversement that Bergson brings to a hundreds-of-years history of otherwise subject-centered metaphysics), the enthusiasm of the person handling my hair would plummet, silence would reign, and the cut was over and done with before she had time to spin me around with a mirror in my hand so that I could assure that the back of my head wasn't slashed-at in too unseemly a manner.

Fed up with the alienation, I decided to simply become a different, more exciting person on just the moment that my ass hit the swiveling chair and the plastic hair-catching cape came swooping down over my body. I would take on the personality of whatever hairdresser happened to be cutting at my hairs. I do this even now: I take their vocal cues and pick up on their syntactical tendencies and become them in order to easily find common ground for conversation.  And I of course pattern my stories after their own.  The tactic has so far been a success, totally eliminating the awkwardness and insuring that my hair is in caring hands.  Oh, and I've had a ball making up and telling tall-tales on the spot to rave reviews.

...Like the one about how my boyfriend's family hated me because he cheated on his then wife (an oncologist) with me, resulting in their eventual divorce and my being banned from all holiday functions.  I had the whole salon in the palm of my hand at that denouement which was followed with jovial hooting of female solidarity (as if breaking up a marriage is the most primal representation of what it means to be a liberated woman).

Then there was the time that I fashioned myself as a radical proponent of right-winged politics (just following the lead of the one with the scissors!), happily spouting-off conspiracies about Obama's mysterious origins and speaking reverently of Palin's shining view of our national future.

My recent Podiatry fitting room encounters have thus far conformed to this general model, yet instead of taking on the personality of the hairdresser, I take on that of the client, of course.  But I cannot tell you of these experiences yet as I am too busy stealing people's husbands and campaigning for the election of governor of Mississippi and tobacco industry lobbyist HALEY BARBOUR to the office of President of the United States in 2012.  Barbour to the White House first.  Nelson stories later.