Advice, beauty flowed from Rhonda Wilson’s chair

There’s a lonesome hand clinging to the gilded frame of Rhonda Wilson’s beauty shop mirror, a Harley-Davidson collector’s card in the lower left corner and pair of baby shoes high above it.

Once the items surrounded the hairdresser’s reflection as she trimmed, teased and liberally applied dye to her patrons’ coiffures. Wilson’s haircuts were surprises in the making. She never let anyone look up from her beautician’s chair until the job was done.

But now no one is looking upward. In Rhapsody, the Spokane Valley salon where Wilson was a fixture, the reflection of her empty chair gives way to a vacant wall.

Rhonda Mae Wilson died Jan. 29 after slipping on the ice and hitting her head outside her home in Blanchard, Idaho, north of Spirit Lake. She was 51.

To say Wilson merely cut hair would be an understatement. The vinyl upholstered swivel chair at her beauty station witnessed more tears, more laughs, and more deep secrets revealed than any psychologist’s couch. Friends and family say Wilson doled out powerful advice with a few simple sayings. “Love life,” “It’s all good,” and “Life’s too short.”

“Whenever you would go to her with a problem, she would say, ‘You need to make yourself happy. Life’s too short,’ ” said Danni Fergen, Wilson’s niece.

Fergen was one of many family members who regularly sat in Wilson’s chair at Rhapsody. Fergen’s relationship with her aunt was unusual. Wilson and Fergen’s mother, Trudy Speare, were less than a year apart in age. As young women, the two sisters plotted to merge their young families and move into a five-bedroom house in Port Orchard, Wash.

As a child living under the same roof with Wilson, Fergen idolized her aunt, who had fashion model looks, loved to shop and made a living making other women beautiful. It was Wilson’s influence that prompted Fergen at a young age to take scissors to the hair of her neighborhood friends.

But there was a troubled side to Wilson’s life beyond the comprehension of little girls. Wilson had married young, before she was 18. She’d left Central Valley High School prematurely, trading in her school experience for a graduate equivalency diploma and a beautician’s license.

The beauty license lasted more than 30 years, but Wilson’s marriage did not. By the time Wilson was 25 she was moving back to Spokane with her only son, Erik Christen. Suffice it to say Wilson learned early in adulthood that if she was in a bad situation it was up to her to get out of it. Pulling herself up seemed to boost Wilson’s confidence. Family photos tell the story of a young woman who acquired beauty with experience, which isn’t to say young Rhonda Wilson was an ugly duckling. Far from it. She was gorgeous, with a long, slender frame and auburn hair that unfolded across her collarbone like a feminine mane. She had beautiful cheekbones and stunning jaw line.

The more Wilson experienced, the broader her smile grew. Her eyes sparkled more and she held her chin higher. Along the way she picked up another truism; that things always get better, or as Wilson would say, eventually “the sun will shine, the flowers will bloom and we’ll all win the lottery.”

Wilson was always ready to push friends and family down the road to change. At one time or another, she convinced all of her siblings to dye their hair blond.

“Every one should be blond at least once,” Wilson told her brothers and sisters. Gathered at their childhood home to talk about their sister, some of Wilson’s siblings still show signs of their blond conversion. Trudy Speare is blond to the scalp. Brian Spurlock has golden ends on his brunet locks.

But Wilson had more colors up her sleeve than a box of Crayolas. Ronda Walker, owner of Rhapsody, said Wilson had a reputation for latching onto a color in the morning and adding it to the hair of every client who came in that day. Sometimes Wilson would dye an entire head of hair. Other times, she would just add a streak. Even children waiting for their moms to get made over would get a little color before they left the shop.

“And she splashed color everywhere, on the floor, on the walls,” Walker said.

The finish on the wooden desk at Wilson’s workstation is speckled with spots where the bleach the beautician used ate through the veneer.

Wilson called end results of her stylings “happy hair.” In the years leading up to her death, she had taken up metal art, creating face masks with colorful steel curls of happy hair pointing every which way.

Often in the salon Wilson charged customers nothing for the result. In the process of cutting a person’s hair, if Wilson figured out that they really didn’t have a lot of money, she’d just tell them to pay her next time. “It’s all good,” she would say, never thinking twice about her decision.

There are still patrons of Wilson stopping by Rhapsody for a haircut and learning of her death for the first time, Walker said. Almost a month has gone by and still the news is devastating. The other beauticians console the customers, but comfort is hard to come by.

If only there were someone to remind everyone that “the sun will come out, the flowers will bloom and we’ll all win the lottery.”