I was in the salon on Saturday, a momentous occasion for me. It's not that I hate the salon. It's more that I keep hoping my hair will learn to cut itself. Hasn't happened yet, so there I was for one of my three-times-a-year visits. The highlights were finished after the following conversation with my stylist:

Her: "So what shade were you thinking?"

Me: (wrapped in a six-sizes-too-big smock with my comfy Sketchers shoes poking out the bottom - the same ones I bought in college) "Uh, the one that lets me not come back for 5 months."

Her: (checking her notes...my last appointment: February) "Right."

She knows me. There's no changing me now.

So she'd smeared the stuff that looked suspiciously...and deliciously...like a chocolate malt in my hair and sent me off to be shampooed by her assistant in one of those little head bowls. The whole process always makes me feel like the family dog who's just been drug out into the backyard with a bottle of Palmolive and the garden hose. Afterwards, I slunk back to her station with my wet fur plastered to my head to await my trim.

Because she is Super Stylist, able to leap tall blow dryers in a single bound, she had managed to cut someone else while I was being scoured clean. While she finished up, I watched the client in the chair next to her. After being fluffed and trimmed by her own hair dresser, the woman pulled out of her hand bag half a dozen horse tails.

Okay, they weren't horse tails technically, but if there's a palomino out there undergoing chemo, I know a good place for a wig.

Without even having to look at the back of her head, the woman inserted the horse ta - okay, hair extensions - each one under a successive layer of real hair until she'd made herself a real/fake hair layer cake of blonde mane that hung halfway down her back. Then she checked her makeup, stood up in her four-inch stilettos, smoothed her size 0 shorts (yes, heels with shorts) over her South Beach tan legs and sauntered (yes, sauntered) out of the salon. There may have been air kisses involved, I'm not sure.

Me to my stylist: "Did you see that?"

Her: "Yep. High maintenance. That woman is like the opposite of you."

And it's true. She was a chick, a babe, a got-it-down-to-a-science sort of girl.

Now, I don't know this person. She's probably very nice. I'm sure she buys Girl Scout cookies, volunteers at the hospice and takes in homeless one-legged dogs. But she looks like the kind of person who would go to the bar with you, order a cosmo, gossip about the other chicks and then steal your boyfriend - the Samantha of the woman world. ("Sex in the City" reference)

I am not a chick. I'm more of a gal. If the world is a buddy movie, I am the affable sidekick. More of the house-sit-your-cat, help-you-eat-the-last-piece-of-cheesecake, go-with-you-to-let-the-air-out-of-the-cheating-ex-boyfriend's-tires type.

And you know, I like being a gal. I like going to the salon once every five months. I like cheesecake. And I hate stilettos. They pinch my toes. So I say, gals everywhere unite! Pat yourself on the back. It's good being us, and it takes a lot less time to get us ready.