Beauty Saloon

That was the misspelled banner I saw on a newly constructed building last Sunday. I laughed a little. But then my mind was barraged by images of women with bee-hives wearing chaps and spurs. Swinging doors, and stylists with holstered hair dryers. Someone knocking over a manicure station and starting a fight by smashing a bottle of polish and wielding a file.

In the third grade I played the lead in "Clementella" a Western version of Cinderella. I imagine Clementella would have gone to a Beauty Saloon. I don't remember much about that production -- I can't even remember who Prince Charming was -- but I do remember that my veil for the wedding finale apparently came off a wedding cake, or something, and smelled kind of sickly sweet, like decaying sugar, like maybe what Miss Havisham's veil smelled like. I remember it gave me a headache, but I went on stage smiling anyway, because, you know, show business.

And that pretty much sums up what it's like to exist in this business we call "show." Sometimes it makes you smile, sometimes it gives you a headache, most of the time it's both, but we go on anyway, because, really, there's nothing else to do. Or, as I heard Steven Spielberg once say, "The only thing worse than making a movie, is not making a movie."

Which means we're always somewhere on the "the show must go on" spectrum from: "Everything about it is appealing! Everything the traffic will allow! No where could you have that happy feeling...!" to "...It will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." (That's for you Beckett fans.)

It also means, we drive by misspelled banners and signs and imagine the show with that name. So even if we're only entertaining ourselves, well, you know...it's someone.