Mallory's Camera

So I did what everyone should do when they're feeling massively sorry for themselves – I hacked off all my hair. And blew 200 bucks on make-up, teeth whitening gunk and anti-wrinkle cream.

I've abandoned Veronica, my Latina stylist, who I'd followed through every move up the hair stylist ladder of success for several years. I went to the mall. Got a $13 cut, tipped $20. I only kept going to Veronica, truth be told, because her life fascinated me – not that her life was so terribly interesting (although Clint Eastwood did hit on her in a bar five years ago), quite the opposite, in fact: it was relentlessly ordinary. But because of the strange way I was brought up, the banal exercises the appeal to me that the exotic exercises for most folk.

Veronica was considering how to force her live-in boyfriend of four years to propose when I first met her. This was also the point at which I was trying to force Edie – my previous stylist – to back off from the Tina Turner wig look. "But you're supposed to go lighter as you get older," Edie would insist, fingers rifling through my hair. I looked like a French poodle on steroids. Loyalty to beauticians, however, is one of my few virtues. I would never have dreamed of abandoning Edie had not a hair crisis come up – some ICM-related function at which it would not do to turn up with gray roots. And Edie refused to fit me in.

So I went to the mall. And met Veronica.

"I've been there for him," sighed Veronica, her fingers fussing with my bangs. "I've done a lot for him. I don't know why he won't do this one little thing for me."

Boy, could I relate.

"Veronica, I want to go dark," I said recklessly. "Think you can do that for me?"

"Sure," said Veronica. "Why not?"

I followed Veronica from the mall to the pleasantly shabby little salon off Abrego that got absolutely no drop-in traffic, thence to Venus – a cold industrial-style establishment whose aesthetic bespoke an owner who spent too much time reading W Magazine and wishing she lived in New York – and finally to some place in Carmel. During that time, Veronica snagged the ring and the date, suffered a miscarriage and bought a home in a Salinas development. When last we spoke, Veronica was considering dropping out of the exciting world of hair styling and opening a dry-cleaning business. And that's when her life finally got too boring even for me.

And who should I run into as I emerged from Quick Cuts with my new Sex Victim Unit detective look but Marybeth! "Patty, your hair –"

"Don't say a word!" I cautioned.

"No, it looks good!"

We made a date for dinner and drinking this Thursday night. But if she bails this time, it is off the Cosmic Christmas Card list forever!