Dubbed the "Beauty Ambassador," Weir turned his tonsorial talents to diplomacy in a recent three-week tour of Peking and Shanghai. After barbering his way through a whirlwind round of lectures, demonstrations and visits to beauty parlors, Weir confessed he grew a little tired of seeing heads—especially on the food at dinner. "Everything they served me had heads on it," he said. Weir found plenty of curiosity about Western hairstyles, but he concluded China wasn't quite ready for the most daring dos. "The approach is different," as he puts it. "At one beauty salon I was introduced to the star cutter, and he was wearing a uniform like everybody else. Let's just say he wasn't wearing a Gucci belt."
In Shanghai, Weir visited the Hujiang salon, one of the city's 25 most popular high-class establishments. Since reopening in 1983, the state-run shop has been doing some 100 perms a day, reviving the lofty reputation it enjoyed as a privately owned enterprise 30 years ago. There Weir found modern blow dryers being used side by side with old-fashioned electric perm machines. He did pick up a few pointers, however, such as using a facial cream made from ground pearls to keep skin looking young, and employing chopsticks as curlers. "They should do this in America; you can even curl the shortest hair," said Weir, whose salon on P Street in Washington also caters to Joan Rivers—when she's in town—and Dallas star Linda Gray. Weir also bumped into Madame Xie Xide, 64, a regular patron, solid-state physicist and president of Shanghai's prestigious Fudan University, who hosted the presidential party during the Reagan visit last year. "Send my regards to the Reagans," she told Weir as she left with a new perm.
Later about 200 of 300 invited guests braved a typhoon to come to Shanghai's Literature and Arts Auditorium to watch Weir work shear magic on some female volunteers. While cameras taped the event for local TV, Weir gave Cao Hong, a 23-year-old receptionist at the Shanghai Hotel, the "uptown look." Her eyes widened when she asked how much such a coif would cost in the U.S. and heard the reply: $80. She earns about $30 a month, and China's top stylists get $69 a month plus a bonus—higher than the average monthly salary.
Audience reaction was mixed. "It looks too new for me," volunteered Xue Lian, a young interpreter for the Shanghai Tourism Corporation. "The shape is all right, but it's not very neat." Said Cao Hong's boss, Wang Runsheng: "She'll be astonished when she sees herself in the mirror." As to the relevance of Weir's demonstration to China, Wang added, "We must proceed from our national reality. We must assimilate only the good things. In everything, not only in hairstyle, you shouldn't go too far." Cao Hong seemed to think Weir had done just that. She never said she hated her new coif, in so many words, but the next day she stayed home from work.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
