If You Don’t Look Good, We Don’t Look Good

Sassoon gives designer Mary Quant the ultimate no-muss, no-fuss hair cut. So Sassy!

  Vidal Sassoon, the haircare guru who forever changed the way women wear their hair, has died. He was 84 and I consider that to be a very nice length of lifetime, right?   Anyone today working in the business of hair — cutting it, styling it, washing it or blow-drying it, owes a debt of gratitude to the guy who freed us all from rollers and old-fashioned space helmet-like hair dryers that kept our mothers captive for many long, hot Saturday afternoons. 
    Praise for Sassoon’s genius is piling up like hair under a busy barber’s chair. Tabitha Coffey, the star of the Bravo reality show Tabitha Takes Over tweeted that her day had been ruined by the news of Sassoon’s death. Madison Avenue salon owner and celebrity stylist Oscar Blandi said Sassoon showed him the “true art of styling” and made him fall in love with the hair business.

Legend has it that when Mia Farrow had her long, silky mane of blond hair cut short by Sassoon her then husband Frank Sinatra served her with divorce papers. It was much too sassy a move for Frank.

    I knew a guy who fell out of love with the hair business thanks to Vidal Sassoon. He was Richard Heyman, who owned the Gingerbread Square Gallery here in Key West. Way before Richard found his way to the Southernmost Point, he made a small, but impressive enough fortune in the hair business. Mr. Richard’s Salons occupied several storefronts in Toledo, Ohio. Each salon employed a busy staff of hairdressers. It was the mid-'60s and respectable women, of which there were plenty in Toledo according to Richard, dutifully maintained their hair with unerring dedication to tradition, just like their mothers had. 
    Richard Heyman was enjoying great success in the hair business when the innovative Vidal Sassoon splashed onto the scene. Sassoon was English, and in those days London was the trendsetting capital of the world with icons like Twiggy, Mary Quant, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, all topping their brilliant, arty heads, with no-nonsense precision cuts ala Vidal Sassoon.  Richard packed off for London, and studied with Sassoon himself. And because Richard never did anything half way, he learned to do a flawless Sassoon cut, just like they did in London. Richard brought London style back to Toledo, and his customers loved him for it. Sassoon’s wash and wear cut was all the rage. And Mr. Richard’s Salons became the trendsetting place to go for mod hair.

Yeah!! No more rollers! No more teasing! No more shellack!

    But Sassoon’s innovations turned out to be not so good for Richard’s business. 
    Before Sassoon, the hair routine in Toledo went like this: once or twice a week women would visit the beauty parlor for a wash, set and comb out. This holy trinity of hair care could be administered to as many as 25 customers in a day. It was done assembly line style. First the shampoo girl shampooed. Then the hairdresser put the hair in rollers. Then, a turn in the hair dryer, with its strange, hot, ear-roasting solitude. Finally, back to the hairdresser for the comb out. Hair was teased, sprayed and shellacked into place, where it stayed put until the next visit.
    The Sassoon haircut changed everything. It was possible, before Sassoon, to fluff  (Richard’s word) a whole neighborhood of women in one busy salon day. But the Sassoon haircut, with its careful symmetry, demanded time. No rollers, no dryers, no hairspray or shellack needed. Further, one good precision cut haircut could keep a woman out of the beauty salon for weeks at a time.

Mayor Richard Heyman laughing at my hair.

    Richard’s beauty parlors went from being money making wash, set and comb-out factories to leisurely salons, where hair stylists in mini-skirts and 5-point hair cuts lavished their progressive customers with refreshments, conversations and picture books of Sassoon-inspired hair designs, and carefully calculated each woman’s leap into the trendy world of the sexually revolutionary '60s. (Morning hair that tossed right back into place after a wild night in bed made the one-night stand far more practical.) Mr. Richard’s business foundered. And since Richard Heyman enjoyed nothing less than bustling success, he grew restless, sold his hair care empire, and moved to Miami to consider his next move.
    Richard came to Key West, where he founded the Gingerbread Square Gallery. He loved the island city and dedicated himself to making Key West the best place it could be. He got into local politics. And then another ground-breaking move: he was elected America’s first openly gay mayor. Revolutionary. I worked for Mayor Heyman for four years, and learned from him important lessons that put me on the path to a very happy life.

Don't you just know that Sassoon and Mr. Richard are partying together, somewhere, where you don't need hair?

    So today I’m thinking I, too, owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Sassoon, not just for freeing my mother and me from the tyranny of rollers and hairspray, but also for sending to Key West Richard Heyman, a man who changed my life with his spirit of fun, of fair play, of enthusiasm. RIP Vidal Sassoon. And RIP sweet Richard. May you party on in Hair Heaven.

I Love New York (on TV)

Seinfeld

    Here in Key West Seinfeld is on from 11 to midnight, two episodes, every night. A while back, when I was ill, I got into the habit of falling asleep to Seinfeld. It was therapeutic listening to those familiar voices, reminding me of the absurdity of the world in which I so wanted to stay. Now that I’m healthy again, I still do bedtime Seinfeld reruns again and again. I could probably recite verbatim most Seinfeld scripts, just as I can sing the score from West Side Story from memory. Really.
    For many years I worked Thursday nights -- Seinfeld night -- and only heard the talk about this new, very funny television show called Seinfeld. I was a late comer, but once I found the show, I couldn’t get enough of Jerry and Elaine and George and Kramer. Those characters are authentic. I knew these people when I lived in New York! George’s father -- that guy was my father, the quintessential, short, grumpy New York dad. They even look alike.
    When I hosted the locally produced television show MD TV, we chose to come on right before Seinfeld. MD TV was on for 8 years. We were on long after Seinfeld had hung it up. The key to our success: that lucky time slot of 7:30, Thursdays, right before Seinfeld.

Anderson

    I’ve heard he’s gay -- not that there’s anything wrong with that. I love Anderson Cooper’s brand of journalism, but also his wry sense of humor, which he exposes far more often in his morning talk show than on his serious nighttime news show. Cooper is an American institution, a Vanderbilt heir, who could be hanging out, doing nothing but looking real good, with Paris Hilton and the other famous for nothing celebs. But no. Anderson has character and ambition. He has earned his fame, fair and square.
    His mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, to whom he shows utter adoration when she appears on the show, designs fabulous jeans. Gloria has led a poor little rich girl fairy tale life, with fantastic highs and horrific lows. How could her son Anderson be anything other than amazing?
    Anderson and I share a passion for dulce de leche ice cream. His talk show is at 9 a.m., opposite Rachel Ray, a show I used to like, but now turn to only when Anderson’s show is too real, like when he interviews murderers or dog trainers. Rachel is charming, sure, but when she lists ingredients for her daily recipe, she seems to think we all live just down the block from Balducci’s.

Mad Men

      Ah, New York in the '60s. I remember clearly that smoky train ride between Grand Central Station and Katonah. I might have chatted with Don Draper on that train ride that he, an advertising executive and I, a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, so frequently rode. We’d have flirted and shared a beer and many cigarettes, and we may well have taken that relationship a step or two further, because that’s how we behaved in the '60s. And yet at the time, just like the people on Mad Men, I wasn’t having much fun, doing what everybody was doing. I recall a pervasive misery, an aching sense of not fitting in. I saw a terrible reality gap between what my parents believed and demonstrated to me in the way they were living their lives, and the way people around me, and at my school in New York City, were living theirs, breaking all tradition, being free, outrageous and, well, shameless. I’d seen what shame could do so I wanted the opposite. I was 17 when I met a man and woman who unabashedly told me they were living together. In sin! I was certain that merely sitting at the same table with them would guarantee me a place in Hell.
    There’s a real sense of darkness around that show. It’s in the music, the endless smoking and drinking and sly sexing and moping children. Each week I wonder, who is the guy toppling off the top of the building? It really could be any one of them. In the '60s, it could have been me.

Almost Home

On the Overseas Highway, again

Every time I face a follow-up test or examination for the cancer that side-railed my life for several years, I work my way into a terrible funk, a deep, dark and midnight blue place just this side of true depression. I’m just too overall happy to go all the way to official depression anymore. So I call a funk the blues. As in “How are you, June?” “I’m nursing a case of the blues.” Nobody tries to talk you out of that because the blues is perfectly acceptable, pure as the driven, spirit-dampening rain that began my decline a week or so back. It’s OK to be blue once in a while. It’s understandable, particularly when facing a fork in the road, which is how I view follow-up exams related to my recovery from cancer.

Tina Dykes makes beautiful jewelry and sells it at the artists co-op, the Key Largo Art Gallery

    Monday we drove to Miami to see Dr. David Arnold, the guy who has treated my throat cancer from the very first biopsy through radiation, chemo, a relapse and second tumor, surgery, more chemo, baldness, skinniness, and recovery. I wish I’d taken photos of myself at every visit, as they would tell the story of my cancer adventure far better than mere words can. Cancer, in the beginning stages, doesn’t make you sick. The things they do to chase it away is what makes you sick.    

At Mile Marker 103 you need a con leche!!

I love these lamps at the Community Thrift Shop. I would have bought them, but they were too kitschy for Michael.

Pon, at Num Thai. Order the Spider Roll and eat your fears.

    Being on the road to Miami for that check-up with the Big Guy, Dr. Arnold, the make-it or break-it guy with the power to send you forth into your lovely life, disease free and unbound, or back home in despair, to plan for another dreaded biopsy, you sweat. As Michael and I know all too well, things can go either way when Dr. Arnold laces that tube into the nostril, down into the throat and into those wet, mucusy places where cancer once found a foothold.

At the Key Largo Gallery.  I think I lost my virginity in this bus!

    The news is good. Perfect. I am well, my mucus membranes intact, pink and vibrant. No lumps to worry over. No bumps to keep me awake at night. I am healed. And, as everybody knows, the further away from cancer you get, the better your chances of never having it again become. You’re never home free, but no one ever is, right?
    The good news means I can sleep again, and, in a Miami hotel, I do, catching up on many nights of lost sleep, and many days of too-little-sleep fatigue. I dream of the ribbon of life, un-spooling before me, no end in sight. Michael is much too kind to wake me from my celebratory slumber. I awaken at last hungry as a bear, just out of hibernation. Feed me!

The Juice House serves fabulous Cuban food, too.

    On the drive home, we feel as if we’ve won the lottery. Michael is buoyant. We take a long, lovely layover in Central Plaza, my favorite strip mall, at Mile Marker 103. While he sits in the car, drinking cafe con leche, listening for one of his songs on the satellite radio, I explore.
    Back on the road, I take a turn driving, and the Overseas Highway is so broad and sparklingly beautiful in the sun I ask Michael to take a picture. Of what? he asks. Of the open road, I say. Of how it looks when you’re nearing Big Pine Key, getting closer to Key West, when your heart is bursting with joy, when you’re well again.

I'll Have The Senior Discount, Please

Whatever happened to Baby June?

Junior Senior Citizen

I’m turning 62 years old tomorrow, Friday, the 13th. This date suggests nothing more sinister to me than the fact that I am crossing into junior league senior citizenship. I am not superstitious. I am a realist.

    Sixty-five is the golden ring we boomers have our eyes on now. At 65 you get Medicare. At 65 the absolute and all-American horror of living naked and vulnerable, that is without health insurance, comes to an end. Yesterday at Publix I ran into two of these lucky women. They appeared to be as spry as teenagers. Clicking their heels and talking about how wonderful their lives had become since reaching lucky 65. No more insurance nightmares. AND a check in the mail every month.
    I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to turn 62 and I’ve come to the conclusion that I am a lot less intimidated by this development than the people who create the women's’ magazines piled around my favorite reading chair. In article after article we readers are coached on tricks for looking younger than we really are, with hair color, fashion, diets, skin treatments, surgery, meditation, vitamins and exotic teas, anything at all to avoid the truth of time and it’s triumph over the flesh. And when I read of these often desperate measures I think, sure, your head and your hair will look great, but what happens when you remove those edgy fashions? What happens when you don a bikini? And while I have nothing but admiration for women who bikini in over-60 bodies, there are none that I know of who can erase the passage of time while standing unclad, with every sweet and sour secret of a lifetime revealed.

My photographer daughter Susan says this shot
from The Big Lebowski Party is quintessential June and Michael.

    My friend Mary has had every one of the above listed procedures designed to hide her advancing age. On a car trip north she ducked into a Denny’s restaurant for lunch. My husband describes this woman as Joan Rivers dipped in bronze. And after all that dedication to retaining her youthful glow, as she swallowed the last of her hot water with lemon, a weary waitress dropped off her check, and murmured, “I gave you the senior discount.”

Miguel, Will, Tony, Tanner, Mark: The Con Leche Band. I hope they know how cool I am.

    I have battled with my son to be viewed not as an older woman, his mother, but as someone very hip, someone who can dance all night (I can), someone ready at a moment’s notice for an adventure (I am), someone who swears like a truck driver (I do). Last night Miguel came by with Tanner, a member of his band Con Leche. We sat on the deck and talked about music and Jimi Hendrix and howled at the moon. After an hour they left. Michael and I returned to the living room, closing the door to the deck behind us.
    “Now we can get back to being little old people watching television at night,” I said.
    “Dang,” Michael said. “We missed Jeopardy.”

You gotta love Claire Lynch. And I do.

She's The One

Miguel is just under 6'4"

 When he was growing up we always told our son Miguel to not even consider getting married until he was 30 years old. You don’t know who you are until you’re 30, we told him. We also told him, every night as we tucked him into bed, that he should always know that he was having a very wonderful childhood. This second bit was something I learned from a book by Steve Allen in which he writes that to grow healthy children he assured his little ones each and every day that they were having happy childhoods. So it must have worked, because Miguel is a nice, cheery man—a few years past 30, and still unmarried!
    Miguel is a serial monogamist. He has had several girl friends for several long times. (Of course I’m sure there have been many mini-romances, too, but those are rights of passage events, social exercises, way outside the scope of what I need to know.)

Still life: Good Genes with Bananas

    I have always been intensely interested in knowing the girls who’ve captured his heart, the potential mothers of my grandchildren, and usually have found them to be every bit as charming as he thinks they are. But my intense curiosity is not always a good thing. When he moved in with his first girlfriend, I asked her, over dinner one night, if she took birth control pills. My son was mortified. Not her. “Absolutely,” she answered, smiling sweetly.
    My great faux pas with his last girlfriend was asking her how much she weighed. This came up innocently enough. We were talking high school sports. I thought to myself, as we were talking, that she appeared to be the same size as I when I was consumed with playing field hockey. There, across the table, sat Little Me!
    “How much do you weigh?” I asked, excited.
    Silence. The great silence of the deeply offended.

Key West's Best Key Lime Pie  (Mine)

    The next day Miguel said, “I can’t believe you asked her how much she weighs. She hates talking about her weight.”
    That lady, and her secrets, is now history.
    Now there is Mia. She’s been in the picture for many months now, and I’ve been madly curious about her.
    “Don’t worry,” Miguel told me. “Mia is going to be around for a long time.”
    Yesterday, as we were preparing for a visit from Miguel and Mia, I told my wise stepdaughter Laura that I was nervous, afraid I’d talk too much, say something totally ridiculous like, “How tall are you anyway?” (Which, in fact, I did.)
    And Laura, who is lovely, wrote: “You have nothing to be nervous about. She'll think she's hit the jackpot of potential future mother-in-laws when she gets to know you. And I'm not just saying that because I've had your to-die-for shrimp scampi before.”

Father and son songwriters in Paradise

    I made the shrimp scampi, and garlic bread, and key lime pie with fresh whipped cream. They loved it all! As we were enjoying the fabulously greasy garlic bread I told Mia that when Dolly Parton was asked to choose a food she could eat exclusively for the rest of her life she answered: “fried dough.” 
    “Good answer,” Mia said, and right at that instant, there was a tiny click in my heart and I knew we two had bonded as only two bread & butter-loving blonds can. 
    Mia entertained us with stories of her father’s health food store in Maine, where she began working at the age of 8. She said she eats only white bread today, rebelling against the coarse, multigrained barely chewable stuff she ate as a child. Her family also ate many meals of unadorned tofu, because that was good for them, too.
    Before they left last night I told Mia I had to take photos of her and Miguel for our daughters, and for the people who read my blog. She cheerfully posed for my camera. At one point, while I was trying to make the camera work and maybe she thought no one was looking, she touched Miguel’s face tenderly and murmured “Your skin is so perfect! Good genes!”
    Oh yeah. She’s The One.

Telling It Like It Shoulda Been

Slaving over a hot word processor in Paradise.

I’ve been writing a weekly blog for over a year now. I write my blog on Thursdays. It’s not always easy to think of something to write about. So why keep a schedule? you might ask. Why not just write when you feel like it? My blog is an exercise in self-discipline. If I only wrote when I felt deeply inspired to write, very little would get written by this writer. To have written is far more fun than writing. I write to get to the part where I’m finished writing. Life is so much sweeter when there’s fresh ink drying on the page in my writing room.
    When I learned that I would be writing a weekly column for the Miami Herald newspaper, quite a few years ago when newspapers were important, I called my grandmother, the one who’d always believed in my writing, the one who gave me my first typewriter, and my first desk. I told her my big news.
    “Oh dear!” she said.
    “Why ‘Oh dear,’ Gramma?” I asked her.
    “How will you ever think of something to write about every single Saturday?”
    Some columns, or blogs, are more inspiring than others, of course. I don’t write about religion, or politics, or my corporate job, although these are the things that most consume me, my passion and my opinions. I don’t write about those subjects because I don’t like to fight, or argue, or debate.

June at 15. She looked so happy. She was so sad.

My canvas, if you will, is Key West, my paradise. It is here where I healed from the wounds of a difficult childhood and adolescence, and here where I became aware of a world outside of my own very sad interior one. It is difficult to be blue in a place where the sun shines just about every day of the year, where gingerbread and Victoriana and a beach are never more than a block or two away. It is impossible to maintain resentment after being gifted with a beautiful family, a crew of true friends, and a disposition ever vigilant for a laugh.
    I have made mistakes this year, and learned from them. When I wrote about my son Miguel, at age 5, commenting on his teacher sunbathing topless at the beach, he reminded me that that incident had happened at the County Beach, not at Fort Taylor Beach. I knew that, but for the purpose of that essay, I wrote it my way. That, my journalist friend told me, was wrong. She agreed with my son.
    “If you take license with that,” she reasoned, “I, the reader must wonder, what else did she lie about in this story?”
    And I understand that she’s right. I’m not a fiction writer after all.

Mama June with baby Miguel. Oh joy!

    When I told a story from my New York childhood, about a friend’s mother’s accident, and my father coming to her rescue, I wrote it because I thought that was how it had happened. My friend sent to me a scathing e-mail, telling me that my father had never been present at the accident, and that other parts of my recollection about our childhood were dead wrong, too. I was horrified, because what I’d viewed as something sweet and unique, was to her difficult and embarrassing. She was furious with me for telling her story, using her name, and posting a photo I’d taken of her and her baby, I took the blog and photos down. I’m hurt that she feels so betrayed, after over 50 years of friendship that were so special to me. But I’m a writer, after all. My story is my truth.
    My son was just four when he and a bunch of Key West kids were in a television commercial, filmed in a building with a steep, concrete staircase. As the kids, my own kid, my ex-husband and I hustled out of the building and down the stairs, a tiny little girl of maybe three years old, reached for the rail, missed it, and toppled head first toward the ground two stories below. It seemed to happen in slow motion. In an instant I leaned over, reached out, and grabbed the tiny girl by the leg. She banged into the stairs and cried in fright. My son’s father, a big man with long arms, immediately took her from my arms, as I shivered with a massive rush of adrenaline. Without me, that girl would have been gravely injured. Or dead.
    The next day my ex said to me, “How does it feel to have saved a little girl’s life?”
    A few months later, and to this day, he says “Remember when I saved that little girl from going headfirst off those stairs?”
    The man still insists that it was he, and not I, that reached out and grabbed that little ankle before it was too late. He believes it with all his heart. And I believe it was me. I believe it with all my heart. I’d swear to it on a witness stand.
    So that’s what I’ve learned from writing a year of blogs. The truth is a slippery thing, like a vein when you’re trying to draw blood. It’s there, and then it isn’t. But in fact, it’s always there, somewhere. Otherwise, you'd be dead.

I Got the Crabs at Joe’s

A Miami Beach landmark.

A couple of weeks ago my darling husband and I were snuggling quite promisingly in our cozy bed when a tiny but persistent beep began emanating from somewhere nearby. A truck backing up outside? A smoke alarm? Some bit of computer gadgetry we’ve yet to uncover amid our mass of modern technology?

Michael, June and Waiter Doug at Joe's Crabs.

    “It’s me,” Michael whispered. “Don’t worry.”
    I immediately disentangled myself from his warm arms and sat erect in the bed.
    “It’s YOU?” I asked.
    “It’s my defibrillator,” he said. “It does that every day at 9 a.m.  It means it’s time to get a new battery.”
    Seven years ago Michael suffered a heart attack. Because he is thin, a nonsmoker and nondrinker, at the time he thought he was getting the flu. The last thing either of us suspected was a heart attack. On that day he looked pretty awful and was uncharacteristically grouchy. I figured it was the flu. He was turning greener by the moment. A sheen of sweat covered his forehead. He felt cool and clammy to the touch. I noticed that when he tried to relax with a magazine, he held it upside down, and turned the pages as if it were a common thing to do.  That’s when I insisted on a visit to the emergency room. It was a heart attack. We were helicoptered to Miami. Michael survived. He was installed with a defibrillator, which is kind of like having an emergency room in your chest. Should his heart skip a beat or two, that defibrillator delivers a shock that feels akin to being kicked in the chest by a mule. It’s quite an amazing setup. Its only flaw is that after five years or so, its battery needs to be changed out. That means a brief surgical procedure. And that’s why we were in Miami Beach last week — to have his battery changed out and silence that weird warning beep in his chest.
    Apparently implanted defibrillators and pacemakers are not rare. Not long after Michael received his we were at a dinner party where two other guests confessed that they, too, sported defibrillators. 

They really look like this, too.

    “Don’t get us too excited,” one guy said. “We may all go off at the same time!”
    By 11 a.m. the procedure was done and Michael was being discharged from the hospital. While we waited for paperwork, I thankfully entertained visions of heading away from the hospital, driving back to the hotel, and enjoying an afternoon nap before evening. But no. Michael was hungry. And because he was emerging from anesthesia, and his thinking was a bit askew, he was particularly suggestible.
    “Is it OK for me to eat now?” he asked his cardiologist.
    “Sure!,” his happy doctor said. “You should go to Joe’s Crabs on the beach and have the fried chicken. It’s only $5 and it’s delicious.”
    I’m not even going to go into how I feel about a cardiologist telling a man with a heart condition to have himself a plate of fried chicken for lunch. Fried chicken is my Southern-bred husband’s favorite dish. Further, he’d missed breakfast. Finally, we were bone tired, having risen by 4:30 a.m. to be at the hospital by 6 that morning.

Eating Key Lime Pie at Joe's three hours post-op.

    We headed to Joe’s, which, the doctor said, was “just down the road.” The GPS in our car told us that Joe’s was 3.5 miles away. However, on a March day, the very height of tourist season, on Miami Beach, 3.5 miles might as well be 100 miles. It took us a bumper-to-bumper hour to get to Joe’s.
    Joe’s really is a cool spot. You are greeted by men in white shirts and black bow ties, with impeccable service skills. We were seated on the patio. It was a glorious day, silky and breezy as only a March day in Florida can be. By that time of the day, there were no lines. Michael ordered fried chicken, which is $5.95 at lunchtime. He insisted that I have stone crab claws, as a reward for being such a good driver.

The Cheesecake Factory.

    The food was wonderful. The chicken was old-timey and excellent. My crab claws, all three of them, were delicious. The creamed spinach, featuring a wonderful base flavor of nutmeg, and the shredded potatoes fried to crispy perfection, were divine. The Key Lime pie was perfect. It really was a most enjoyable repast. We chatted with our waiter and took photos. Our bill was roughly equivalent to our weekly shop at Publix, but heh, Joe’s is a bucket list event. You’ve gotta do it once or you haven’t really lived. 
    Driving out of Miami Beach was a whole lot easier than driving in. We stopped to pick up Michael’s pain meds. We were in a hotel by dark. Michael took a Tylenol with codeine and settled in front of the television for the news shows. I headed out to meet my friend Patty for a leisurely dinner. Yes, that’s right. Dinner! At the Cheesecake Factory we dined on the best macaroni and cheese imaginable.
     To sum up our visit to Miami . . . Lunch at Joe's: $65. Dinner at the Cheesecake Factory: $40. An emergency room implanted in your heart: priceless.