My Wife is Smarter than Me.

I’ll give you a moment to absorb the shock of this declaration.

Now that you’ve gathered your composure after the shift in your worldview brought about by the title of this post, I repeat: my wife is smarter than me. She speaks another language (reads and writes in it too) can tell the difference between clean and orderly (I’m told, at least, that there is a difference), and she figured out that the weird buttons in the hallway of our apartment building are light switches after I spent a week stumbling up and down the stairs waving at the lights because I thought they were motion activated. Abbey’s intelligence, however, tends to be of the innocent variety…until this past Saturday.

Saturday, Abbey was clever, plotting even. She had devised a plan to make me speak French. To a stranger. In a circumstance where a mispronunciation or gaffe could have drastic ramifications. I had to speak French to a bubbly, energetic coiffeuse.

This was my second haircut in this country and I wimped out on the first one – I whined and wimpered until Abbey agreed to accompany me instead of speaking French on my own like a big boy. This time, Abbey was accompanying me as well, though she also planned on having her hair trimmed. I was under the impression that I would sit uselessly mute and wait while Abbey got her hair cut and then sit uselessly mute in a chair while Abbey told someone how to make me beautiful. After waiting for a few minutes in the salon, a dashing young man with his shirt half unbuttoned whisked Abbey away to the shampooing station. Abbey smiled. I realized that I had been had.

I was alone. Abbey and Pierre were speaking their secret code language and I did not know what to do. I ran through every bit of vocabulary that I have amassed in the past few months and realized that I knew how to say “more,” “less,” “long,” and “short.” I could make it through this. As I ran through my internal linguistic inventory Abbey and moussehead walked to the front of the salon, waving as they passed. I can only assume that Abbey was detailing to Gerard Depardieu her master plan to make me speak French.

“Monsieur, foo doo fafa fwah fois gras escargot shampwan croissant?” asked the young lady who would soon be trimming my hair as she pointed towards the shampooing station.

Ah! A shampooing!

“Oui.” I confidently replied.

She said something while shampooing my hair and I pretended not to hear her.

She dried off my hair and she pointed towards the chair. I sat. “Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?”

“un petit plus court, s’il vous plait.” (Booyah)

“Quoi?” (damn)

She apparently did not understand what I had thought to be my immaculate pronunciation. I resorted to pointing. She went and got a book of haircuts and opened to a picture of Brad Pitt between a few teenagers’ glamour shots. She pointed at one and said “like this?” I replied “oui, mais un petit plus long.” After pointing and grunting and several “oui”s and “non”s and “plus long”s and “plus court”s, she pulled out the scissors and – I kid you not – apologized to me for speaking in English. Game time.

“Ca c’est bien?”

“Un petit plus courts s’il vous plait.”

“Comme ca?" she asked, pointing at the length that she would make my hair.

“Oui, c’est tres bien.” (And a thumbs up sign – that’s universal right?)

“Voulez vous les cheveux fous?”

umm...“Quoi?”

“Voulez vous les cheveux fous?” I did hear her right…decision time…"did I want the crazy hair?" Perhaps in a subconscious attempt at retaliation towards my wife (after all, she would have to look at my “cheveux fous” until it grew out and became non-crazy again) I replied.

“Porquoi pas?”

We laughed. She pulled out what looked to be scissors, but were in fact half razor half scissors. This could get amusing.

She made my hair crazy, trimmed the neckline and I was on my merry way, only to turn around and see Jean Girard and Abbey looking at me giggling. Abbey got her hair straightened and looked good enough to make me forgive her for her wicked plan to make me talk to French people. We paid and went back to the apartment, her looking radiant and me looking…well…fou. But I chose les cheveux fous.

Success.



My "Cheveux Fous"

Thanks for reading.