The Detroit Tribune

Cab Sees Half-Ash Blondes as Stoical

By CAB CALLOWAY

Just saw a sign in a beauty parlor over the 7th Avenue near 57th street where some of the pretty chi chi gals have their tresses curled, dyed, trimmed, knotted, shampooed in stale beer and rubbed with corn meal.

The sign made me look twice, but there was no doubt. This is what it said:

"The new sensation—half ash silver blonde!"

Explanation point, slow fade, end of paragraph.

I've never been able to dig how the gals can go through that torture chamber treatment every week or two, even the half ash ones.

Fit to Scream

But I'll tell you one thing. Don't ever talk to a girl for the next three hours after she has been to her beautician. She's fit to scream at the slightest provocation, and there's no sense sticking your toe into the bear trap.

They go in at 10 a.m. and emerge at 4 p.m., beautiful. At least they are going to be beautiful when it wears off. Actually, they go in looking fresh and beautiful. They come out looking as if someone had been at them with a whip for six hours.

Out of Fair

Their hair is stiff, knotted stuff which looks like a mediocre grade of Manila hemp. Their face is drawn. The shoulders droop, the chest sinks, the step lags. And the disposition is something out of the Grimm's most gruesome fairy tale.

Sticks and snails and puppy dog tails take on the charm of a bougainvillea bush in full bloom as compared with their momentary outlook on life.

The male may be the stronger sex, but I defy any of us to go into a beauty shop at 10, have our hair doused with beer, pulled, twisted into pin curls and then baked in a temperature which parallels the temps of Hades; have our fingernails stabbed at; have our face scrubbed with wire brushes; have our limbs pulled and jerked and our hips pounded, and come out looking like more than somebody's idiot son.

That blonde may be half ash, but she's stoical.