Coffee, Idle Chitchat and a $15 Wash-and-Set
The rhythms of the Pzazz beauty salon manifest at 8:30 a.m. when the curling irons warm up, coffee is brewed and sweet rolls are served. Stylists scan the day’s appointments and check hair spray supplies, as the first of the day’s clients trickle in.
The cadence picks up half an hour later with the high-pitched drone of the blow dryers, streams of water in the shampoo bowls and chatter between manicurist and client.
Pzazz, set smack in the middle of La Canada Flintridge’s Foothill Boulevard, is a throwback to a time when women had standing appointments for a weekly wash-and-set. When Hungarian-born Elizabeth Suli started work as a hair stylist in the United States in 1964, the wash-and-set crowd were her clients. They stayed with her when she had a shop in Montrose in 1970, and when she opened Pzazz in 1977, they followed her there. With a few exceptions, that crowd, now in their 60s and 70s, still reigns. Their presence is a testament to the power of the beauty ritual.
To some of these women, it’s an hourlong refuge from the world, a place to make comforting small talk with stylists who are still referred to as “beauty operators.” A soothing retreat under a domed dryer reading one-pan chicken recipes in a women’s magazine. A haven where you come in looking like “The wrath of God,” as one woman described it, and leave with your self-esteem restored.
“This is one of those old-fashioned beauty shops in a small town where everyone knows everyone,” says M. J. Sprowl, a longtime client. “It’s like coming home. And I always come out improved,” she says and laughs. “I have a once-a-week ritual because I don’t like to stay home. So Wednesday I get my hair done, Thursday I go to a class on ancient art, and on Friday I have my cleaning lady and we clean house.”
“We have so many ladies who have been here forever,” says Patti Manuele, the stylist who’s working Sprowl’s hair into a short, fluffed do. “I have ladies who had small children, and now those small children have grown up and had children of their own. So you feel like part of the family. I know all their kids and their kids’ kids.”
“I’ve lived in La Canada since 1968,” Sprowl says. “It hasn’t changed that much. I wouldn’t call it smart, like the Westside. But it’s solid.”
“Smart” doesn’t describe Pzazz either; it’s the antithesis of glitzy salons where stylists wear black and overuse the word fabulous . It’s more the Salon That Time Forgot, where a wash and set is only $15, hair dye comes in bottles marked “Saucy Beige” and “Chocolate Kiss,” and clients come in just for a cup of coffee, a piece of coffee cake and a little schmoozing.
Only here it’s not schmoozing, it’s chitchat.
Sit in the middle of the salon for a while, and the grooming rituals become mesmerizing: sections of wet hair separated and wrapped around rollers pinned to the head; peroxide painted on wisps of bangs flattened against pieces of foil, then folded over neatly; short hair back-combed into perfect puffiness. The stylist’s hands are robotic and graceful at the same time, seldom missing a beat.
“We’re thinking about giving the salon a little face lift,” says Suli as she makes perfect hair twirls with a curling iron. “It’s a little bit heavy-looking now, very Mediterranean. Not completely change it, but change some colors.”
The present scheme is avocado green and brown. Stylists’ chairs are covered in avocado vinyl, as are the coffee mugs and banks of seats for the domed hair dryers. Carved dark wood moldings accent the wall; pots of philodendrons sit on a shelf near the ceiling. Family snapshots are pushed into the corners of the stylists’ mirrors.
Ernesto Delgado is the lone man in this den of females. The 31-year-old stylist is also the newest member of the Pzazz family (he used to work at a trendy--but now-defunct--La Canada shop), and his clients tend to be younger, in their 20s and 30s.
“When I came here, I told my clients that the salon was like the play ‘Steel Magnolias,’ ” he says, touching up dark roots on a young woman’s hair. “But a lot of my clients who come here say they feel really comfortable. And I love being the only man here; I feel like a king, really!”
About noon, receptionist Eyloe Vogelgesang takes lunch orders. On busy days like Fridays and Saturdays, there is usually no time to go out; meals are downed quickly or nibbled in stages in the back room.
“We have a couple of empty chairs,” Suli says with a shrug, explaining the fallout from the recession. “But we are still doing very well, we are very busy in the mornings. Some other shops have closed up, but we are still here. I think people like coming here; we are all like family. When it’s somebody’s birthday, we have a little party. On the salon’s anniversary, I take everybody out.”
She returns to a client, tipping a bottle of hair dye and massaging the color into her scalp. They trade stories about their grandchildren.
Another regular client of Manuele’s is asked what she would miss about the salon if she had to stop going.
She pauses.
“Visiting everybody. They always want to know where I’ve traveled. I always send postcards. I’ve never sent postcards to a beauty parlor before in my life.”
