Salon Stereotypes

There are probably quite a few people out there today who don't have a clue who Tippi Hedren is.  Sorry old folks who are currently going harrumph, nobody gives a damn.  For those of us not sullenly mumbling about "back in my day", Tippi Hedren was a somewhat famous actress from the 1960's and 1970's whose main claim to fame was starring in two Alfred Hitchcock films (The Birds and Marnie), which given she was blonde, involved her getting stalked by the famed director and having live birds thrown at her for days when she rebuffed his advances.  For those of you who still have no idea who Tippi Hedren is, she's the mother of Melanie Griffith, who famously starred in the 1980's hit Working Girl, the penultimate film for lover’s of 1980's business women in large shoulder pads.  What, you have no idea who Melanie Griffith is?  Well, she's the mother of Dakota Johnson, who is better known as the woman a whole shit ton of other women pretend to be while watching the film Fifty Shades of Grey.  God, Hollywood it just chock full of nepotism, ain't it.

Anyways, none of that is really important.  Nor is it important that Hedren spent a large part of her money trying to save big cats like lions by turning her yard into a nature preserve for them, which eventually led to her daughter Melanie getting mauled by one.  No, what's important is the fact that Tippi Hedren is pretty much entirely responsible for one of the biggest stereotypes concerning Vietnamese women in this country.  No, not that the whole sideways you know what thing.  Jesus, what in the hell is wrong with you?  No, I'm talking about Vietnamese women running nail salons.

The year was 1975, and Tippy Hedren was really into having fancy nails.  We're talking about the bright colored big old long ones that look like they can be used for gutting a fish.  Aside from flashy claws, Tippy was also really into charity, as every good rapidly aging actor has to be.  Tippy's charity of choice worked with Vietnamese refugees, which what with the Vietnam War coming to a less than stellar end, there was a shit ton of in the U.S. at the time, especially in California.  After visiting a refugee camp near Sacramento, Tippy decided to use her Hollywood magic to help the women refugees by getting them some job training.  She brought in seamstresses, typists, and many others, but none of it really took off; mostly because few of the women had any English skills.  However, though the women had little interest in typewriters covered in strange letters and numerals, they were completely enamored by Tippy's fingernails.  That's when it hit her.  She loved having her nails done, these women needed jobs, so why not have the women do her nails.

Things kind of took off from there. Tippy not only flew in her personal manicurist to give lessons, she also partnered with a local beauty school to create a space for those lessons to occur.  When the Vietnamese women started graduating, Tippy worked her Hollywood magic again, this time by helping the women find jobs.  Where once there had been a camp full of refugees, now there was a whole gaggle of enterprising women, and boy howdy how they were enterprising.  The Vietnamese women, what with being broke refugees and all, charged half of what other manicurists charged for their services.  This had the dual result of shifting manicures from a luxury only affordable by the bourgeois to something anyone could purchase, and driving pretty much all of the non-Vietnamese competition out of business.   Thanks to every woman and their dog in America getting a manicure, the industry began booming and is today estimated to worth somewhere in the area of $8 billion nationwide.  Today, it is still dominated by Vietnamese, who own 50 percent of the ships in the country.  Not bad for a woman mostly famous for getting birds thrown at her face. 

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tippi_Hedren_in_1982.jpg

The Great American Sports Story

Figure skating is a sport where it helps to have a shit ton of money.  Pretty much all winter sports are this way. It's just how things are. Between the need for skates, fancy costumes, and hours upon hours of practice, it just doesn't come cheap.  Tonya Harding didn't have any of that shit. No, what Tonya had was a drive to succeed backed by a verbally and physically abusive alcoholic chain smoking mother who was willing to invest what little she made as a waitress in her daughter's dream, though this was most likely only in the hope of a big payoff sometime in the future.  You see, Tonya was white trash.  There's really no other way to put it.  We're talking couch out on the front porch white trash.  We're talking getting sexually harassed by your step brother white trash.  We're talking everyone in the family arguing over a pack of smokes white trash.  We're talking always right on the edge of being homeless white trash.  Oh wait, that last one isn't funny? Well guess what, neither is being poor as shit.

Growing up under such conditions, Tonya was a good hunter, mechanic, and pool player, but what she really excelled at was figure skating.  Tonya loved figure skating, and maybe sensing a chance for a better life, her family threw everything they had behind her.  When the family didn't have enough money to pay for skating lessons, her mother combed the highways looking for cans.  When Tonya was told she would need a fur coat to fit in at competitions, her father hunted down local rabbits and made her one.  It was the kind of story they make Disney movies about, the plucky have-not forcing their way into the world of the haves, but Tonya was no Cinderella.  Instead of catchy songs and wisecracking animal pals, she had chain smoking, backhands, and a hell of a lot of cursing.  The world of figure skating, with its blue bloods and upturned noses, treated Tonya like shit, and in return she just spit it right back in their faces.  She was who she was, and she wasn't going to feel ashamed about it.  At age 16, she dropped out of high school to focus one hundred percent on her skating.  At age 19, she married her high school boyfriend, a man by the name of Jeff Gillooly, who enjoyed driving his truck through mud and beating his new wife from time to time.

On the figure skating scene Tonya became well known for her amazing physical prowess, and the fact that the judges hated her guts.  She was everything figure skating wasn't.  She wasn't beautiful and she didn't fit in.  They considered her homemade costumes, unkempt hair, and general white trashiness to be an embarrassment to the sport.  Tonya answered by becoming the first American woman to perform the exceedingly difficult triple axel, forcing them to give her the accolades she felt she deserved.  However, after failing to medal in the 1992 Olympics, she dropped out of the limelight.  With no education to fall back on and her marriage ending in a divorce full of violence and restraining orders, she took a job as a waitress and disappeared.  That was the end of it, at least until it was decided to hold the next Winter Olympics only two years later, in 1994, rather than the usual four.  Emboldened to try again, Tonya began a training regime involving homemade workout equipment and using the public skating rink at the mall.  She even got back together with her ex-husband.  The stage was set for the proving of the American dream.

For the upcoming Olympics, Tonya's biggest competition was expected to come from fellow American skater Nancy Kerrigan, an upper middle class princess.  Tonya’s husband Jeff, probably wanting to make up for all the wife beating, concocted a scheme with his friend Shawn Eckhardt, a man who despite living with his parents was convinced that he was an international secret agent, to send threatening letters to Kerrigan to psyche her out.  What exactly happened from there varies depending upon who you ask, but it ended with Kerrigan getting knee capped by some random white trash idiot and the Olympics becoming a media bonanza the likes of which had never been seen before.  In the end, both women competed, with Tonya finishing eighth and Kerrigan winning the silver.  Soon after, Tonya was found guilty of conspiring to hinder the prosecution of the idiots who carried out the attack, though not of actually knowing about the plans beyond sending some threatening letters, and was summarily banned from figure skating for life.

With no education and no way to support herself without figure skating, Tonya tried to cash in on her fame in any way possible, including acting in a low budget movie, starting a band that failed after one gig, and trying professional women's boxing for a time.  Meanwhile, her ex-husband Jeff, who was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for his involvement, got by via the sale of a sex tape the pair had made when they were married. Hated and reviled, the punchline of countless jokes, Tonya disappeared back into the redneck world from which she had emerged, a world of drunken brawls and doing whatever you have to in order to get by.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonya_Harding#/media/File:Tonya_Harding_Olympic_practice_at_Clackamas_Town_Center_1994_3.jpg

Let's Wrap This Up

In 1933, a young college student by the name of Ralph Wiley was working his part time job at Dow Chemical cleaning beakers used in a failed experiment to create newer and better dry cleaning chemicals.  Unfortunately for Ralph, who was most likely hoping he'd be able to knock off early to try and score with some hot blonde, one of the beakers stubbornly refused to come clean.  Now while most part-time workers would most likely eventually just give up and throw the beaker out, after all hot blondes were waiting, Ralph was a different sort of fella.  Instead he took the beaker to his bosses and laid out all the ways that such a substance might be useful.  Though the stuff was green, greasy, and stank to high heaven, the boss men agreed and before you could say Bob's your uncle they gave Ralph a full time job. That gunk in the beaker turned out to be a new type of plastic called polyvinylidene chloride (PVDC), which the whizzes down at the marketing department branded under the name Saran, which was a combination of the boss man's cat's and dog's names, Sarah and Ann.

It took Ralph nearly three years to figure out how to take Saran from its humble beaker ruining beginnings and turn it into a product that was actually useful.  First developed as a spray, Saran was sold to the military, because almost all great products have their start in military applications, where it was used as a coating for fighter jets to protect them from salty sea spray and as a mesh insole for combat boots.  Soon after that, it was picked up by the car industry to coat automobile upholstery to help make it more stain proof.

However, the wonderful new invention didn't finally find its true calling until the late 1940's when Ralph finally managed to create the same product without the shitty green color and terrible odor.  In 1949, he used this new formulation to create the famous clingy plastic wrap known as Saran Wrap that for so long kept all of our leftovers fresh.  Now at the time, there were many other plastic wraps on the market, but Saran Wrap, thanks to the formulation of PVDC, had a couple distinct advantages.  One was the fact that it would stick to practically anything.  The second was that it was less permeable, meaning that it let in less oxygen, therefore cutting down on food rot, while at the same time letting out less food odors, meaning that saving some French Onion soup wouldn't stink up your entire refrigerator.  The new product proved immensely popular, and it wasn't long before it could be found in every household in America.

Now right here is where the story could probably end, but that's not the end of the story.  You see, Saran Wrap was invented at the height of what became known as the technocracy, a period in world history when it was widely believed that technology could be used to overcome every problem.  It was a period of explosive discovery that lasted throughout the 1950's and 1960's, during which it seemed humankind would at last bend the chaos of the world to its will.  Unfortunately, the world bit back with a vengeance, and it soon became apparent that many of the great advancements of the period had negative aspects when it came to the environment and health.  Unfortunately, Saran Wrap fell into this category.

In 1998, Dow sold the right to manufacture Saran Wrap to the S.C. Johnson Company, the manufacturer of pretty much every household product you can think of.  Unfortunately for S.C. Johnson, they quickly realized they had been sold a bit of a lemon when it came out that PVDC emitted a whole shit ton of toxic chemicals when it was burned or thrown away in landfills. Now usually in these types of stories this is the point where the company hires a bunch of marketing gurus and starts shredding memos to create plausible deniability.  However, S.C. Johnson instead decided that yeah, releasing a shit ton of toxic chemicals just so people could keep their food fresh was kind of a dumb idea, and so abandoned the use of PVDC in favor of the less useful plastics used by their competitors which basically stick to nothing and are about as useful as leaving your leftovers uncovered in the fridge.  Saran Wrap lost market share, S.C. Johnson lost money, and the world got to know that at least some corporations aren't just money grubbing bastards.  Happy smiles and all, though I wouldn't feel too bad for S.C. Johnson. They also own Ziploc.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dress_Holiday_Butter_Cookies_in_the_Best_-_DPLA_-_8b4e997fab6c32ce5ff092b6d2d5421b.jpg