Beauty Shop Tales
The Garden of Proserpine
Here, where the world is quiet, Here, where all trouble seems Dead winds and spent waves riot In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing For reaping folk and sowing, For harvest-time and mowing, A sleepy world of streams.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Today, as I fly out of LAX, probably for the last time, the souvenirs I'm taking with me are two truths I gleaned doing hair in the Hollywood movie industry: 1) appearance is everything; and 2) reality, that eternal shape-shifter, is the biggest illusion of all.
Reality is 99.9 percent perception. It morphs into whatever form best moves ahead the perceiver.
As I, Avril Carson, thirty-five-year-old widow of Chet, and former aspiring-starlet-turned-Hollywood-stylist, wipe my clammy palms on my Dolce &am ... read full excerpt from Beauty Shop Tales ebook