The Guild 12-3-2002 Lurch and the She-Devil Coif Wars [Avert your eyes ALERT]

FAIR HAIR CARE? KERRY CUT COST HALF OF HILLARY'S; SENATOR CONFIRMS CRISTOPHE CLIP

Senator John Kerry confirmed late Monday that he's been visiting Washington's famed Cristophe Salon for haircuts, where he has been paying $75 a visit -- half of what Senator Hillary Clinton was charged for a similar shampoo, cut, blow and go!

This report revealed on Monday how Kerry, a self-described "Man of The People", has been quietly visiting Cristophe's, getting cleaned and coifed by Isabelle Goetz, Hillary Clinton's hairstylist.

A well-placed source claimed Kerry had been charged Isabel's going rate of $150 for the trim; the WASHINGTONIAN also reported in August that Ms. Goetz charges $150 a visit at Cristophe Salon.

"Isabel charges Senator Clinton $150, but charges Senator Kerry $75?" challenged one Hill source. "I think Hillary needs to speak out for all women everywhere against the discrimination, if this is true!"

The Kerry $75 haircut versus Hillary's $150 one raises an important civil rights issue waged by the National Organization for Women, among others. Hair salons have long employed practices that charge women prices far greater than their male counterparts.

"There is a growing consensus that basing prices upon gender is wrong and illegal and that increasingly it will fall, either under existing sex-discrimination suits or new ones as they may be passed," says John Banzhaf, a law professor at The George Washington University Law School in Washington.

In 1995, the Republican governor of California Pete Wilson signed a law that did away with different prices based on different genders for haircutting.

The Gender Tax Repeal Act, also known as the Equal Pricing Act, made the state the first in the nation to specifically prohibit gender discrimination in pricing.

While California does allow merchants to charge higher rates to one of the sexes if they can prove the costs are justified, the District of Columbia has ruled out the cost-basis defense in its law.

Grab a hanky....

I came across this somewhere in cyberspace tonight:

A Thrill of Hope
The snow made it the kind of December day a Southerner always wished for as a child, but almost never got. It was especially wonderful after the sun went down and the streetlights went on, causing the snow to appear to glow. We went over to an a cappella concert at Battery Park tonight, close to Ground Zero, a little neighborhood kind of thing. We wanted to hear the Roches -- sisters Maggie, Suzzy and Terre -- perform Christmas music. Their fantastic Christmas album is long out of print, but it is a gem of Mrs. D's and my teenage years, so the prospect of hearing them was a real New York treat.
So after we came in from Brooklyn on the subway, we stopped by Ground Zero, to say a prayer. You might remember the Brooks Brothers store across from the south tower; on 9/11, it served as a makeshift morgue. Rescuers stacked recovered body parts in its aisles. Tonight, though, the store windows were filled with red ribbons, greenery and Christmas merchandise, bathed in warm light. I tell you, it almost made me weep to see that mundane resurrection.
I stood across the street, at the fence ringing the site, and noticed the large steel-beam cross on its pedestal, its arms holding up a thin frosting of snow. Just beyond it, someone had put up a huge Christmas tree. Evergreen. Life. I turned away and walked back to where my wife and three-year-old son were standing. A man in a trenchcoat walked off making some kind of noise. Julie pointed to him. 'Did you hear him?' she asked. No, I hadn't. 'He was a businessman, I think, and he was singing Ave Maria at the top of his lungs as he passed the site.'
Over at Battery Park, on the banks of the Hudson River, the Roches had just begun Handel's 'Hallelujah Chorus' in three-part harmony as we walked up. We got hot chocolate and Christmas cookies, and stood under snow-laden trees listening to these sisters sing the most beautiful versions of sacred and secular carols I've heard in ages. The snow was still falling on the dark waves of the Hudson, and my boy told me he wanted to cross over to Jersey. "That's where Edison lives," he said. But we stood in the snow with the neighborhood folks, listening to the music, with hearts full of gratitude for this city in our place in it.
A little over a year ago, on that day, this neighborhood was covered with grey ash, and choked by acrid smoke from the inferno a few blocks away. Tonight, though, everything was frosted white by the snow, clean and deep and pure. Watching the bundled-up children laughing and eating peppermint canes and throwing snowballs at each other, I thought about how terrified they must have been on 9/11, and wondered if they and their parents ever thought a night so serene and joyous as this one would ever come to their neighborhood again.
As the sisters sang, I noticed an older man, maybe a businessman, attending an older woman in a wheelchair. She must have been his wife. She was wrapped snugly in a grey shawl, her thin face swaddled by a red scarf. Her face looked so forlorn and expressionless, I thought she must be depressed. Then he brought her a Christmas cookie, and she brought her right hand out from under the shawl to take it. Her hand shook violently, and she labored to bring the cookie to her mouth. Parkinson's. This would account for the frozen expression on her face. From that moment, it was hard to take my eyes off the couple. The old man was so tender with his wife, fussing to see that she had what she needed, that she was warm, that she felt the touch of his hand.
When the Roches began to sing O Holy Night, the old man bended his knee in the snow, placed his face on his wife's shoulder, and softly sang the words to her. His bright eyes brimmed with love and mercy, hers stared into the distance. 'O night! O night divine!' There is not enough evil in the world to extinguish the good in the hearts of men.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Isn't that beautiful?!

Well, you certainly know how to greet a person in the morning...**smiling**. No, I don't have any special magic place. There are a few good websites I visit every day:

National Review

Opinion Journal (Wall St. Jrnl)--especially and "Best of the Web Today" by James Taranto. It is posted mid afternoon and takes some hillarious shots at that day's headlines.

The Weekly Standard

Real Clear Politics dot com

I've read them so much, I've learned which authors I love to read and can tell when a link might lead me to a good story. (Most of these sites use links within the body of their articles.) I now recall that I found the above story at "The Corner", an interesting stop at the National Review site. It's a message board where all their writers carry on conversations throughout the day. Sometimes it's a little mundane, but sometimes---breaking news days---it's fun to see their first reactions to news. The sweet NY Christmas story was posted there by one of their writers as a Christmas card to his co-workers.

None of the above links charges a fee. You may have to register, though. (They're worth it). OR, you can just wait for me to wade through them and put up the best of the lot. :)

CHANGING SUBJECT: Has it occured to you that Saddam is taking a page out of the Bent One's playbook? Remember when Clinton used to provide investigators with "thousands of documents" and then send his minions out to crow about it? Only problem was, the particular subpoenaed docs wouldn't be included. Saddam is learning from the master.

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