A Bar of Soap and a Lesson Missed

I was browsing through L’Occitane one day, looking for a bar of soap. Among the many offerings, I noticed three lovely and fragrant bars which were labeled shampoo soap. The fragrance brought back memories of the factory in Nice, France, which I had visited years ago on a trip to Europe with my students. Making conversation, always with a teacher’s purpose in mind, I told the young woman helping me that we used to wash our hair in my country with cheap soap made by the socialist centralized economy run by the Communist Party and their only soap available left a nasty whitish residue on the hair shaft, which no amount of rinsing could wash off, and the soap had a distinctive and unpleasant odor. We used the same soap to launder our clothes by hand as we did not have washers and dryers, nor could we have afforded them.