HAIRSPRAY

Well, here I am in Orlando, my least favorite city in the world, and I must say that repeated business trips here have not helped the place grow on me. I arrived to a torrential downpour, and my first stop was a grocery store I could get to only by walking through--terror of terrors--Bargain World, this scary chain of souvenir shops. And there's a reason it's called Bargain World and not, say, Mensa--when I walked in, it was pouring, and a giant leak was streaming out of the ceiling right in front of the door. To remedy this situation, some genius decided the perfect fix to collect the water would be--you guessed it--a cardboard box.

And it's all been all downhill since. I returned to my hotel this evening after a long day of work, only to find the hotel lobby and its imaginatively named bar (the Lobby Lounge) full of... hair people.

That's right, Hair People. More accurately, salon workers there to learn more about the quality hair products offered by Redken. I rode up in the elevator with a woman who was obviously not one of the Hair People, and a very drunk male Hair Person ("Hair People," though, seems to be a misnomer, as any reasonable human being who walked into a beauty parlor and saw one of these folks would run out screaming) . The big surprise, and the only pleasant one of the day, was that the HP chose to hit on the woman, not me.

"Come dahn and drink with all of us [expletive] hair people!" he shouted after her before following her off the elevator on some random floor in the concrete-block, vertical slum of a hotel. "There's a thousand of us down there!"

Note to self: Barricade hotel room door and remain holed up inside until the smell of hair gel recedes.