“ONE DAY LAST SPRING I was standing in the reception area of a fashionable hairdresser’s in midtown Toronto, waiting to pay my bill ($12 for a stark haircut that made me look exactly like one of the Presbyterian aunts I’d spent most of my life avoiding looking like). Ahead of me in the line was this very slick, chic lady of maybe thirty-eight or so dressed exactly as such a lady should be when she is going to spend the morning at the hairbender’s (that’s what chic ladies call all those rickety-cheeky Cockney boys who’ve taken over big-time women’s barbering in the last half-decade) and then on to luncheon with an old friend from school and maybe a meeting of the women’s committee of the symphony. She was wearing a beautifully cut midi coat and dark stockings and a Kenneth Jay Lane bracelet and the kind of tan you get in Acapulco when your husband feels he just has to get away in that dreary time between the skiing and the sailing, and her hair was pale and perfect.

“While the cashier was ringing up her $25 bill (pale and perfect costs more than stark and Presbyterian), she stood looking idly out the window. At that moment, passing in the street, was a couple in their late teens or early twenties, the kind of kids the chic lady doubtless calls hippies, though the way things are going now with kids they may very well have been graduate students in aerodynamics, for all I know.

“The boy had a lot of hair tied back with a leather thong and one of those Iranian embroidered skin vests and very narrow hips and jeans that did them proud, and the girl looked like some kind of curly pre-Raphaelite Madonna in a long wool challis dress with a lot going on underneath that obviously had nothing to do with lingerie. She was sucking an orange and licking the overflow juice from her fingers, and he was holding on to the wrist of her other arm and laughing at her, and they both looked happy or sensually aware, as the Gestalt therapists call it—in any case, as though it was pretty good to be nineteen or twenty-one and with no underwear in the sunshine in late April. The chic lady turned abruptly away from the window and I caught a glimpse of her in the mirror behind the cashier and she was touching her hair with a little rapid patting gesture and in her eyes was this unmistakable look of fear, the kind of o-my-god-why-has-thou-forsaken-me? look, her god being Good Taste or something like that.

“The whole incident didn’t take any more than a minute, but it was a pretty important minute for me because it left me wanting to rush out and phone somebody and say, “Listen, I think I’ve just been witnessing the death of slick.””

~

(from the *essay “Requiem for the High Life” in My Life as a Dame, [personal and political essays] by Christina  McCall)

*Originally appeared in Maclean’s, September, 1971.