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Angie Estes

Lieu de Coiffure Mémoire

Fireproof pious rumor, precious fume of composure with your furious romp and rump furioso, you can arrange everything except the letter D, disappeared, from the shop sign in Paris: Coiffure pour ames. Apparently, even the souls of the dead feel better with a new hairstyle, so in the fourteenth-century vellum illumination of Dante’s Wood of the Suicides, the harpies show up in red stockings, blue wings, and perfect hairdos like that of Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut, set to outlast the winds of Ronchamp. Although pouf and pumice smooth the furor, memory’s slow-burning fuse still arrives at the Do or Dye Salon. Samuel Sewall, the only judge in the Salem witchcraft trials to ever publicly admit his mistake, wrote in his diary that “God has ordained our hair as a test to see whether we will submit to his will or insist on our own.” In her 50s my mother began to wear wigs. Now look what the cat dragged in when he found them perched on their styrofoam stumps, wings flipped up to the sky.