For 35 years, the same faithful visitors have come to East Los Angeles to fill the one room of Toni's Hair Salon, hot with hair dryers and no air conditioning.
Toni--everybody calls her Toni--forgets some of their names now, but not their faces. There's La Senora Ramirez, who has come in, rain or shine, almost every Saturday of those 35 years. There's Nellie, a 20-year client, who, when her husband died, would cry through her appointments with Toni. And there's more, many more.
Along with cuts, dye jobs and perms, life stories are exchanged like recipes, the women's voices rising in a Spanish-English blend above the sound of buses screeching to a halt outside the front door on East 1st Street. For many of her customers, getting through the week was easier knowing that at the end of it, Toni would be there to style their hair.
La Senora Ramirez is Lara Ramirez, 83, of East L.A. But don't expect her to answer many questions. She only likes to talk to Toni. Toni has seen Ramirez through her husband's death, and Ramirez has seen Toni through a divorce. Through it all, Toni watched Ramirez's hair turn from brown to gray.
"You are my baby, right?" Toni says to Ramirez, as she tenderly washes her hair in the sink. Ramirez nods. "Yo le doy besos [I give her kisses]," Toni says, then impishly adds, "Yo le doy nalgaditas [I give her little spankings]."
And there is laughter.
One joke stems from Ramirez wearing the same white jacket and slacks Saturday after Saturday, the familiar floral-print shirt underneath.
"I tell her that when she dies she has to give me her blouse," Toni says. And when she dies, Ramirez has told her children, she wants Toni to style her hair.
In March, Toni sold the business, trading in a six-day week and devoted following for a lunch hour and benefits at a new salon. But every Saturday, she still comes by to style her "old ladies."
When Toni told Ramirez about the sale, Ramirez's son Joe Hernandez worried for his mother.
"Having her hair done [here] is so important that I was concerned with how it would affect her emotionally and mentally when Toni goes," he said. "Some people might think, you go here or there, but Saturdays are important for her."
"She is pretty. She is a very good person," Ramirez finally tells a visitor. "I see her as family, like a good friend."
Another joke: Toni recalls the time when Ramirez was in a car with her husband, and he stopped at the top of a hill and got out of the car for a minute, forgetting to set the emergency break.
