Book Shows Hairstyling’s Not Cut and Dried

Stories?

If Linda Ropes were still cutting hair, she’d have some stories, all right. Over the buzz of her clippers, she’d tell about the book she just published: What’s so unusual about a hairstylist writing a book? she’d ask. There’s a book in all of us.

And the lady in the chair would agree: My cousin wrote a book. The one with the drinking problem . . .

And soon the conversation would turn, as it always did at Linda’s old beauty shop in Camarillo, to kids.

No, Linda would insist, we’re not too old to run around after a 4-year-old and a 5-year-old. We’re only 50. Yes, we know that kids adopted out of abusive homes have problems. But you know how many years it’s been since we’ve watched “Sesame Street”? There--is that the right length?

And the lady in the chair would study herself in the mirror and say it’s just fine and then she’d talk about her kids: The girl’s so sweet one minute, but the next, she’s just cursing you out. Teenagers: Doesn’t it break your heart?

Stories?

There was the woman who’d fall into tears as soon as she hit the chair; the depressed boy who used a wheelchair and who wanted his hair dyed fire-engine red; all the customers who’d share their uncertainties, their anguish, their secrets as the clippers buzzed.

Ropes could write a book--and did.

Zolin’s, the shop she started with her best friend, Zoe Shirley, went out of business two years ago, but now it’s preserved in a slim book of vignettes called “Just a Little Off the Top.”

“There were so many people in and out,” said Ropes, a brown-haired woman with an easy laugh. “I wrote the book because I was afraid I’d forget some of the lessons I learned from them.”

The lessons peek through a curtain of long, glorious hair. Ropes writes about feeling vain and vulnerable one unusual Saturday afternoon: “Suddenly the room fell totally silent . . . I turned around and was shocked to see the very attractive mother sitting totally bald in the waiting room, holding her beautiful blond hair in her lap, her style, her head protection, her wig, our security piled up in a limp bundle of curls in her lap.”

“Just a Little Off the Top” doesn’t pretend to be great literature. The publisher, May Davenport, works from her garage in Los Altos Hills and has printed only 500 copies. Davenport’s latest big seller is “Driver’s Ed is Dead,” a novel by a high school English teacher in Kentucky. It’s selling at high schools in Kentucky, Florida and Puerto Rico.

But Ropes didn’t get into the writing game for the money.

“I felt the need to share these things with my customers so they’d know they touched me in a special way,” she said. “It’s my way of showing gratitude.”

In her kitchen, over coffee and homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, she reminisced about the shop.

Sometimes she and Zoe would close early for the kids’ soccer games or visits from out-of-town relatives.

“Our customers respected that,” she said.

Men would come in for a haircut, she said, but women would want something more--a sounding board, a friend, a therapist. She’d be as open with them as they were with her.

She’d talk about her high school sweetheart, Greg, now a teacher at Newbury Park High School. For the last 30 years, he’s also been her husband. She’d talk about their four kids, now all grown up and getting on with their lives. The youngest, a girl adopted from a Korean orphanage as a baby, struggles with developmental disabilities, and Linda would talk about that too.

If she were still cutting hair, she’d tell the lady in the chair about 4-year-old B. J. and 5-year-old Francis, plucked by county social workers from a domestic hell--the kids she and Greg adopted just last month.

“They’re starting to calm down and settle in,” she said. “At first they were running around wild, with no boundaries at all.”

Aren’t you a little old for this kind of thing? the lady might ask.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Linda Ropes says as her little girl toddles in from preschool. “We’ve got a couple of extra bedrooms and a whole lot of love, so we thought, why not? We just took the plunge and did it.”

Sounds like there might be a book in that.