Lethal Dose

Now that I’ve gotten Howie addicted, it seems that offensive vanity plates are more prevalent than ever. These are just the recent batch:

ORALDOC
SHOTDOC
RGODIS(heart shape)
2TH WOMN
STGMATA (I like that one!)
BABE LUV (a heart where the “U” is) - and on a volvo, too! swinger!

To make it worse, I keep seeing a truck on the freeway called ‘ASPLUNDH.’ Doesn’t that sound like a porn site?

Now I digress as the spillover from vanity plates moves into signage. I saw an incredibly-named barber shop:

HAIRRR’S JOHNNY

Oh, hair salons are just the best for bad names. I’ve blogged on this before, but Mark reminded me of “Salons of our Youth,” and the incredible “Charlies’ Angels” in our neighborhood, owned by one Charlie, whose vanity plate read “CHARLI.” He had that Herb Alpert-swinger-kinda-looks. I never went to any of those salons, because my aunt was a hairdresser. She looked exactly like Dawn Davenport (and was a lot like her, too.) She had a salon with blue-sparkly-vinyl chairs and I spent almost every Saturday of my childhood there, getting coffee for the ladies or styling my own wig head. If my aunt had time, she’d give me my own mini-updo. There were some great salon names: “Beauty Creators,” (I always pictured Frankenstein’s Lab), “Glamour” that had mod-70s-swirly-faux-Erte design wallpaper (I went there once with my mother who was not loyal to her sister’s scissors), the mysterious “Red Bubble Beauty Salon” which again reminded me of a horror movie (What was it? The measles? The blob?)

But what even Mark doesn’t know is my sick, Wednesday Addams-type game I used to play by prank calling beauty salons. Having spent many Saturdays at my aunt’s, I knew the chaos that ensued when the phone rang and someone called looking for a relative that either had left, or hadn’t shown up at all. The women, cigarettes hanging out of their mouths with blue dye on their heads, in plastic capes, would start yelling at whoever answered the phone: “Dottie went ta pick up her husbind!” “No - she said she was goin to the pahk to get her kid from little league first!” This chaos fueled my game. I’d pick a random salon in the yellow pages and call, pretending to cry. “Is my Mommy there?” I’d make up any sort of medical emergency, probably whatever was on “Emergency,” “Medical Center,” that week: “My sister is having a baby and the ambulance isn’t here!” or “There was an accident” (screaming, and vague on details.) Oh the riot that would happen on the other end of the phone … then of course, I’d hang up at fever pitch.