In the basement of my fondest dreams
By Kate Harrigan
It’s Tuesday evening, and I’m sitting in Diana’s basement waiting to get my hair done.
Don’t bother trying to look it up, this place isn’t listed in any Yellow Pages. And the name isn’t an attempt by some cool North Side establishment, staffed by thin, exquisitely dressed people with excessive piercings, to sound grungy. It actually is a basement. I stepped on two small, very hairy dogs on the way down the stairs. And it’s not really Diana’s – this is her mother’s place.
Here, I get a three-step coloring process and the best cut available in the greater-Chicago area for about 25 percent of what I would pay in one of those cool places on the North Side. (I told you, it’s not in the Yellow Pages, so stop looking.)
I’m sitting on the clothes dryer waiting for Diana to work her wonders and listening to a conversation shouted among a woman waiting for a shampoo, another with toxic fumes emanating from her head and a third who keeps lifting the hood on the old-fashioned hairdryer in the corner to chime in with an opinion. The topics range freely from kids to men to work and then back around to kids.
The dogs are underfoot and Diana’s two small girls keep dashing in and getting a bit of attention from the customers before their mom drives them back out. One woman is making her own change from the cash box and another is writing her next appointment in Diana’s book. Someone asks me to move my legs so she can fold a load of towels.
“Ma,” Diana bellows, “can you come rinse Cynthia?”
Apparently her mother doesn’t hear over the racket, but the woman says she’ll do it herself and bends over the sink. Hey, at these prices everyone has to do their part.
Another woman arrives and leans against the wall. Diana has a waiting room in the front of the finished basement, but that is men’s territory. Her father has it decorated with his Indian arrowhead collection and too many hunting trophies, the dead-animal-head kind. Even if it weren’t for the heads, the waiting room usually is crawling with little kids and a big television blares out there, apparently hardwired to play “The Lion King” over and over. I, at least, always sit on the clothes dryer.
Despite the chaos, this place is a sanctuary. The back of the standard-issue, old-Chicago finished basement is painted a deep lavender. The walls and tabletops are dotted with candles and quirky decorations. A faux picket fence runs along one wall. This is a place for women.
I used to work in the women’s movement, where there was always talk about creating “women’s spaces” where we could discover “new ways of doing and of being” without the interference of those men who always sought to silence us. It was a nice enough idea, but the discussions I had with other women during the brief time I spent in those places always seemed as contrived as the “spaces” themselves. Diana’s, on the other hand, is as real as it gets – and a while lot more fun.
I can’t walk in the door without Diana demanding to know the status of my sometimes shaky engagement. Then I have to show everyone the pretty diamond, and I start getting all sorts of questions and advice, almost always sound, from women with weird plastic caps on their heads.
The magazines here are old and not particularly trendy. Looking up through the window, all we can see are the wheels of a couple of cars in the driveway. The shampoo person (when she’s there) invariably shoots a stream of warm water straight down your back. (Although the shampoo part of the visit has improved dramatically since Diana got a real shampoo sink. The old metal sink – the kind found in most old Chicago basements – used to leave nasty bruises on the back of my head.) No one has anything pierced but her ears. Not everyone is a size 4. No one is having her hair dyed blue. Here is sanctuary from all things pretentious, hip, hyped or fashionably overpriced.
I wish Diana had time to run a shoe store.
