Everything Is Permitted

This is me and my beautiful wonderful friend Stacey at the hair salon on Sunday. She's the best hairdresser in the whole world and so much fun as you can see in the shots! My hair has remained the same style since I was a little girl except for a few unfortunate moments -- a Toni home perm that made me look like our family poodle Pepi, a bob cut that made the other kind souls in middle school ask, Are you a boy? and one very ill attempt at crimping that still makes me cringe at the smell of burnt hair. Now I stay with the same style, but color it all the time with dyes the color of food and wine and magic-- merlot, sangria, marmalade, ruby slippers.

My mother used to ask if I was going to change the style -- Ted Bundy used to kill girls with your hair, she pointed out. He even had a girlfriend with your hair! A friend of mine once told me that hair carries psychic energy and that I carried a lot of deadness around with me. Split ends, certainly (pre-Stacey, of course), but spiritual deadness? Once a person I dated cut off a piece of my hair for his own personal collection while I was sleeping, and I had to lie to my then-hairdresser (not Stacey, she's a hair psychic and would have seen right through my deception) that I had gotten a piece of gum in it and had to cut it out, hence the big old gob of it gone missing. I pretended to be someone I wasn't with her, someone dull and a little slow, someone who'd do something like cut gum out of her hair and oops, isn't that silly? Aren't I a fool? I sat under the harsh salon lights and thought about how people told their hairdressers everything. Here I was, making up a story a thousand times less interesting than reality, the opposite of everything I strive to do in life. It was a strange feeling, almost as strange as waking up with a piece of your hair missing.


Michelle's Spell of the Day

"We sat there, breathing, watching, not talking. Our sins were yellow stars that ran together. I wanted to stay there all night, just looking." Walter Kirn, My Hard Bargain

Permission

a shot of silver tequilla
a splash of lime juice
a splash of chambord

Rim glass with sugar. Serve chilled.

Benedictions and Maledictions

Everything Is Permitted

We drank to each other, every
shot going down easier than
the last. It’s the outside door
that’s the hardest to unlock
and after that, it’s like the sign
someone spray-painted on the wall
of the club – Everything Is Permitted,
and I knew that I would not leave until
the last credit had rolled. An old
friend of mine used to say,
Jack Daniels is my trigger, meaning
the one she loved above all others,
and I think about the night she broke
down and bought a bottle, opening
herself to all forms of destruction
because she couldn’t resist the one
that made her feel wrapped in love
and hope, that potent possibility
in every shot that went through her.