Thank You Card #5
When we were in San Juan this past February, Tom tried on a Panama hat for the first time and fell in love. Up until this point, he’d never been much for hats, aside from those of the baseball variety, and even then it would be a stretch to say his feelings toward these hats were at all serious. He did, for instance, leave a Yankee hat in Boston in 2007. I shudder to think what happened to that hat, I’m sure it met a gruesome fate worse than anything my imagination dares to conjure. But there was something special about this Panama hat. You can almost see the glow of new love in the picture below. Plus, he looks great in it, right?
Alas, the $50 price tag of this particular hat made him question his love—after all, they did just meet, what if this feeling wasn’t real? After much internal struggle, he walked away, leaving the hat to wait among all the other Panamas for someone else to come along with love afire in his heart and money burning in his wallet. He regretted this decision immediately—the moral of this story? Don’t walk away from true love, you guys, even if the circumstances in which you find it are not ideal—and there was talk of making the hour long drive from the beachside condo in which we were staying back to San Juan the next day. We didn’t end up going back, primarily because the internet can serve as a fantastic matchmaker for those in search of love. When we got home, Tom ordered a Panama hat online. It was a very nice hat—nothing wrong with it except the brim wasn’t the right length. So a few weeks later, he ordered another one. But the internet is not always able to play cupid, and when the hat arrived its brim was a half inch wider than the one he had bought, rather than a half inch shorter as he had specified. He was eventually sent the correct hat, which you can see enjoying a Bahamain beer and a Cuban cigar below.
You may be inclined to think the hat buying would have stopped there, but alas, Tom was still unfulfilled. He couldn’t settle and became…how should I say this? Sartorially promiscuous. And that was why we found ourselves in a TJ Maxx when we were back in Connecticut earlier this month, with Tom in front of a rack of Ben Sherman hats debating between the black one with the gray ribbon or the straw-colored one with the navy ribbon. I left him to his decision, and wandered off into some aisle of women’s clothing, wherein I was approached by a middle-aged woman with curly hair that seemed to be growing into a mullet. She came over to me and asked where I get my hair done. I had the misfortune of having to inform her that an amazing, magical stylist in Santa Barbara named Victoria at Cheri Bibi Salon (formerly at Salon Bamboo) cuts and dyes my hair. “Oh wow, yeah well you can’t get anything like that out here,” she said in dismay. I maybe made some joke about how she should book a flight to California because Victoria was worth it.
To be honest, though making a cross-country flight for a haircut might be a financially irresponsible thing to do in this economy, my recommendation wasn’t completely in jest. Victoria is amazing, and her amazingness can be attributed primarily to two factors. First, she’s excellent at her job. She is well-trained in the technical aspects of hair styling, so she can do pretty much any cut or color your heart could desire. She’s very creative, and she will come up with ideas for cut or color that you never knew could be done. For instance, one of the other comments this woman made was that my hair was all “disconnected” – and I wasn’t sure what she meant so I just smiled like “Yeah, it is, right?” But apparently it’s a real thing! (and a fairly complicated style, judging by that webpage). She also listens, and she can gauge what you’re comfortable with and offer you different suggestions that are within that boundary or even a bit outside of it. I can never really anticipate what my hair will look like when I leave, but I always know it will be some different variation of awesome.
Second, Victoria is just a really decent person. When you have to spend an hour or so with someone who is hovering around you with dye and scissors, it’s nice to feel comfortable with that person (look how at ease I look in that picture below — like there aren’t “sharps” right near my eyes!). She will ask you about your life, and then remember what you told her and bring it up next time you see her. She’s also funny—I still laugh at the term “Jenga trash” when I balance another piece of garbage on top of the trash rather than actually taking it out to the dumpster. Plus, she is a Giants fan and can talk about baseball, and is willing to do that even with Yankee fans, who often earn the scorn of fans from other teams because of all the reasons people hate our team. A ton of my friends go to her now, and I think everyone looks forward to appointments because they know their hair will look awesome afterward, and because she’s fun to hang out with.
And so both of these factors are why both Tom and I signed Thank You Card #5 for her. In this case, it was not only because she always does a rad job on our hair, but because she had agreed to fit us in for appointments the day before we were going to leave for the east coast even though we were on the wait list as a consequence of me calling too late to make appointments. She even agreed to come in at 9 am for my appointment, which is especially generous because I’m sure that’s not her favorite time of day. Neither Tom nor I are people who ever ask to be given different or special treatment from anyone, so we really appreciated that she was willing to do that for us. When we went back home, our hair looked really good. ;)
And you know, with this all said, I’m not really even sure why Tom likes hats so much as they obscure Victoria’s fantastic work. But I am a supportive wife, and so I’ll encourage him along on his search for The One even if I don’t quite understand it. And I implore you, as our friends, to tell him you like his hat when next you see him, whichever one he happens to be wearing. It may help him ease his broken heart and forget about the one in San Juan that got away.
