Becoming a Beautician Vol. 1

episode one

04.25.04 01:19 pm



I promised myself I would keep a journal in beauty school. It really is some kind of bizarro world feeling for me and I knew before I even started that I shouldnt let these sorts of experiences, and this kind of comedic potential slip by unrecorded.
So, I want to begin at the beginning. It's been a lengthy personal journey for me to get to this point, and I think the comedy of my cosmetic foibles will be much more meaningful if we all understand the magnitude of this undertaking.
There are few things I remember from being a child. Very few things actually. I joke with little humor about my two year moving eraser that follows me like a shadow gliding smoothly over and rendering fuzzy at best and inaccessible at worst whatever happenend more than two years ago. On the bright side, the few memories I have managed to retain really stand out. One is dressing up in hijab and pretending to pray in (what I now know to be)muslim fashion. The other, in rather stark contrast, is endlessly braiding and styling this (retrospectively) bizarre, giant, blonde, Barbie head that my mom got me after I decapitated all my regular barbies for ease of hairdoing. She had permanant lavender eyshadow, a graceful swan neck and hair that you could cut and pull out to make it long again. I had a shiny course black bowl cut that had earned me the nickname Sealhead from my parents. All those silvery seattle raindrops rolled off my head leaving streaks, but never wetting past the surface. So, summarily, being the beauty opposite of my dark jewish kid self, Barbie Head was the essence of beauty. Realzing even at this tender age, that I would never be on the model end of the blowdrier, ALL I wanted to do with my life was be a hairdresser. I remember cutting Lindsey Clothier's beautiful and all too prized honey blonde ringlets off with pinking shears in my mom's bathroom after a long summer day at the beach club. I felt like a real professional and she loved the new do until she saw her mother's face.
My parents are at least third generation academics. I was born on the upper west side of Manhattan where my father was an english professor at Columbia University. His father went to Amherst. My mother got her Masters in French Language from Berkeley before they transplanted to the East Coast and she got pregnant with me in 1975. I will never know how my parents lived alone-together in NYC for 8 years. Its one of the great mysteries. In 1988, when I was in 7th grade and, not coincidentally, had the worst hair of my life to date, my parents got divorced. I think it had a lot to do with the changes that are made in self definition depending on what it is that you DO. The big "what do you do?" question. How much does what you do (meaning what you do to make money)define who you ARE. Must you carefully pick what you do to blend and accentuate who you are, what you stand for and the values and morals you wish to follow? Or can you simply hod a decent j-o-b which serves to support your other undertakings and doesnt satify your whole being and define your essence. My generation, or many of us struggles wiht this question with everything we have. In many cases, to the neglect of actually acheiving either the j-o-b or the life satisfaction career and spending years in this purgatorial turmoil of indecision. In the past years of said turmoil, I've must admit I've enjoyed answering purposely simplistically the expectant "and what are you doing now?" questions with "Im a secretary, " Im a nanny," " I sell jewelery," and watching people try to respond without suprise or disappointment.
My father unceremoniously left academia in 1976 after turning down a tenure track position at Rutgers University. Ive often wondered who I would be if Id grown up in Jersey. It's a staggering thought, I may have been Mrs. Jerry Seinfeld goddammit, or Paris Hiltons chubby sidekick. He left teaching to take on the Seattle leg of the family business; wholesale popcorn and snackfood distribution. My great great grandparents, or something like that, were the first people to put popcorn in the movie theaters. He has, to my knowlege, never looked back. The truth was, and for years I could never understand this and thought my dad was a stellar underacheiver, (which he may be,)but really, My dad didnt like having his passion be his livlihood. He didnt want to be forced to publish. He detested the faculty meetings (I can only imagine)and felt that a greater part of the faculty was so illsuited to teaching that they were doing their students more harm than good. True he got to hobnob w/ Edward Said and some of the most brilliant academic minds of our time, some would say that makes it all worth it. But I think at the end of the day, Dad felt like a miserable phony. His passion for learning, for literature and creative spirit did not depend on saying " I teach at Columbia" in response to what do you do, people are not asking "who are you?" they want to know how you pay your rent and who's fundmatching you IRA contributions. Point being, my parents did not encourage me to go to beauty school. They didn't out and out condemn it but it just was never an option. And I put it in the ever expanding category of things "people like us" dont do (skiing, riding in boats, anything having to do with pets indoors, the list goes on.)
I went to college after high school. I was by that time, already a really pretty successful student. I think genetic nerdieness played a large part in my academic success. Its just easy for me. There are many things that arent, but anything having to do with words just seems cinchy. as an aside, i cant do long division and I never learned my multiplication tables. I took ligustics to satsify my "math" req @ UW. I am near-literally retarded at anything having to do w/ numbers and I didn't get my license until I was 22 b/c I was so nervous about driving down small streets w/ cars parked on both sides. I digress.
I went to Bard college for a year, had a fabuous and bougie, boozy time and still couldn't possibly justify 100 grand in debt for a Comparative Religion degree. I do have a healthy dose of uninherited common sense. came back to seattle and went to UW. Now, here we start the self induced neurosis about being a failure, or at the least never living up to my potential. By this time my dad had moved to Spokane (SPOKANE!!) and was an admitedly pretty unsuccessful realtor. A fact I've always chalked up to the tremendous undesirablity of living east of the mountains in Washington state. Vacuum cum dustbowl. At the time, I found this career progression of my Dad's totally devastating. Totally. Here is a man with rain man intellect, wit, charm, culture and a 400+ year history of gentile persecution moving to the most conservative-snow-white-trashy (god forgive me) city on the West Coast (thats a challenge, Fresno. You're on!) Not to mention that I had come nowhere near the understandings that I have now about defining yourseld outside of your work. I felt that my dad, out of fear of true success, or some such Dr Phil-esque pseudo psychological assessment had settled for something less than befit anyone of my family's rich intellectual standing. I have since, through my own understanding of the choices one makes as a wage earning adult, and through honest and insightful conversations with my dad himself, managed to come to terms with his move. I have not, however, totally reliquished the spectre of failure to live up to my potential and am unceasingly on guard for ways I am allowing lazieness, fear or lack of motivation inform my life choices.
I think this puts us at the end of a chapter. Plus I'm at work. ;) HEY!! Im a paid writer!! Thanks U Village management offices!
Stay tuned.
Yours till Niagara falls.
Vivi