Duly Blogged, Professor Jaffee. Duly Blogged

Duely Blogged Prof. Jaffee, Duely Blogged.

05.23.04 04:40 pm



I wrote this whole thing before and it got erased. I almost don’t ever want to write anything again. It’s never as good the second time. WHY didn’t I write it in Word first??? A mistake I won’t make again)

Is that how you spell Duely? Duly? Dooley? I don’t know. It looks like an adjective, like someone is duely. Ex: “ I don’t know about Ted, I mean he finishes his projects on time, he comes to all the meetings, but he’s always smacking me in the face with that leather glove, its like a challenge. That guy’s just a little too duely for my taste.” The Frig needs a spell check.
At this time, I am going to skip ahead a little bit, both for my readers’ continued interest as well as because the closer we get to the present, the better memory serves.
I knew going into the program that this would be as much an education in tolerance and humility as flatirons and chemical services. I decided that, being a somewhat naturally critical individual that it would be good for me to immerse myself in a kind of bottom up, were all beginners here type atmosphere. I set my mind to staying all positive, all the time in school, even if I felt like I wasn’t on the same level as the other students. If I allowed myself to become irritated by all the things at the SCCC cosmetology program that are genuinely irritating, I would look like Jack Palance in about three weeks. Plus, I’m frickin’ paying for this, I may as well enjoy it to its fullest! The first week (and I think they continued on after I left for NYC) was spent discussing learning styles communication styles and personality types. You know those sort of pseudo psychological tests and exercises that you can do to tell you about who you are and how you relate to who everyone else is and how they relate to you. There is some sort of truth to them of course but they’re no substitute for natural intuition and actual interpersonal intelligence. The whole thing was somewhat tortuous. But, I persevered! I discovered I am an A/D type communicator, and vowed to try and adopt some of the strengths of the C and B communicators to temper my dominant tendencies and become a more well rounded learner or whatever. I participated in the group activities like walking around with a famous person’s name taped to my back and asking as few questions as possible to find out who I am ( I was mother Theresa, and I never figured it out). I am the quintessential good sport at school.
Our primary teacher Ms Kendra (now, this Ms. Firstname business kills me! I have not managed to StayPositive! about that. I feel like a kindergartener.) is a tall, white woman with large blonde wavy hair. She is an Image Consultant. She appears to have gotten her experience in image consulting in a large part by creating her own image from the ground up. I don’t think I have ever spent time around someone who has invented themselves to that degree, and it is weird. Every now and again I get a feeling about who she was, usually from her speech (things like sim-u-lar instead of similar), or the fact that she cant spell to save her life. She says she’s dyslexic but she doesn’t reverse things and it looks to me like she just never learned to spell. Plus she said her brother has no teeth and rides a Harley (She disclosed those 2 things on different occasions but since I’ve become a Hannibal Lecteresque profiler I put them together and now picture her growing up in a Lynnwood tract home and riding bitch in a old pickup.) She wears long, tailored suit jackets or leather jackets w/ the same cut over slacks w/ high heeled boots all the time. It is, statistically, the most flattering thing she can wear for her body type. She wears long, curled pieces of her hair down around her face when she wears it up so as to draw attention from a less than chiseled chin, and curls it big w/ volume on the sides to best flatter her rounded oblong facial structure. Her vocal tone is perfectly varied and her hand motions and movements in front of the class are perfectly executed to keep us all interested, all the time. She really is a good teacher, she’s like roboteacher, but there is something really fake about her that bothers me from time to time. Especially when she uses tricks like “Luke Skywalker wore white” to remember the word Leukonychia (a nail disease resulting in white spots on the nail bed) instead of knowing that Leuk is the word root for white (like leukemia kids!) and telling us that. Knowing all this is not helpful and provides another excellent instance wherein ignorance would be blissful.
Ms Belle is a heavyset, Caucasian woman, with big, redbrown curly hair, smokes Marlboro lights at every break, has 20+ years of salon experience and is a refugee from the Gene Juarez advanced training program. She is a really good teacher and knows her stuff from experience, is totally unpretentious and has a very empathetic way about her. She’s a winker, but it’s comforting, not creepy. I think she could benefit greatly from a total overhaul of her diet and exercise, but to each their own.
Ms Aminah also comes to us from Gene Juarez. She is a young (younger than me anyway. 26 I think) African American woman. She is currently 7 months pregnant (not a small 7 months either) she is very pretty, straightens her hair, always has this “girl, shouldn’t you know that already?” look, and has a large tattoo of her first child’s name on her arm. She is a very good hairdresser. She taught manicuring and pedicuring (which I missed the 2nd and 3rd weeks) as well as updos. She is very good on the floor and can help you with technical questions about specific styles, but when it comes to teaching theory she reads directly from the book and says things like “ you gonna want to remember this one cause its gonna be on your Friday test,” and “you guys don’t need to know this.” She could use some work in the classroom… Nonetheless, she keeps it real and I like her.
Ms V is probably my favorite teacher. She looks like she’s in her late 40’s but is probably considerably older than that. She is an African American woman who keeps her hair natural and short, with the front “lifted” to a strange yellow color. Her skin shines in an amazing way. Like burnished wood. She has strong deft hands and her iron clicks and whirls around like it’s weightless. First off she got points with me because her name is identical to the name of the woman from the diner who calls the police in the story of the famous martyr and boxer The Hurricane. Her name was featured in the brilliant and poignant Bob Dylan song of the same name. I love that song. Ms V introduced herself on the first day as “a Christian woman who loves and forgives unequivocally.” I loved that. While Ms. Kendra was reading about Satori moments from Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff (and Its All Small Stuff), which made the subjugated critic within me cringe, Ms V talked about staying motivated and beginning your journey with the end in mind. That, as they say, resonated with me. So far, Ms V has taught us how to press and curl “excessively curly” (i.e. Black folks’) hair using Marcel ovens and irons. So far it’s my favorite thing to do (besides braiding which I have been teaching myself to do) its like sculpture. We get to have her more in later quarters. Getting back to the humility part of the story, before I go on and introduce my classmates, I had a near perfect experience in the parking lot of the Seward Park PCC (that’s Puget Consumer’s Co-op for those of you non Seattleites or Albertson’s shoppers.) An unlikely place for a perfect experience but, God always pulls through in the most unexpected places. I had finished my small marketing errand after working out last week, I have no idea what day it was. It was one of those beautiful Seattle evenings when it’s starting to stay light later and its warm. The light looks pink and our sallow skins get a moment of peach. Anyway, I was leaving basking in the generosity of the checker who couldn’t remember the code for almond butter and threw it in gratis, when I found myself making unusually long and probing eye contact with a bearded orthodox Jewish man in the car passing me. Not unusual for me to be staring shamelessly, but he was staring back, that was unusual. As I drove by, I realized that it was Professor Martin Jaffee. Head of the UW Jewish Studies program and I believe chair of the Jackson School in Jere Bacharach’s absence. Professor Jaffee was my advisor at UW and possibly the most brilliant and intimidating mind I have ever experienced. Why more so than Aron Zysow? Because Jaffee is also a deeply religious man, he manages to be a scholar and a spiritual being which in the university setting is unusual to say the least. I adored him, and always felt dwarfed by the sheer amount of his knowledge and its brilliant arrangement. Nor did he make it easier for us fledgling academics; he was tough as nails. Not mean, but never really encouraging either. I wept openly in his office once, after Ariel dropped a wet hand towel on the outlet the computer I was writing my paper on for his immensely difficult Religion: Nature and Study course, rendering my nearly completed paper into some untranslatable Mac code. Suffice it to say, he was an idol of mine during my brief and only moderately successful academic career and I really wanted him to think I was smart and take me seriously.
I pulled into a handicapped spot and got out of my car to greet him. Suddenly I felt so obtuse and garish. My car seemed more flamboyant than ever and I wished I had worn stockings, or didn’t have bright orange hair. As he limped toward me (even with the five or six inch lift on his left shoe, he has a pronounced limp) from the furthest spot from the store, I even felt bad for pulling up in the handicapped spot and hoped he wouldn’t notice. “Hello Professor Jaffee!” I called to him. “ Its Vivi, do you remember me?” As I got closer to him he said “Of course. Genevieve, how are you? How long have you been back in the country? How was your time in Persia” Someone must have told him about my Pakistan trip, news among Jews travels like inaccurate wildfire. I answered, feeling ordinary, that it was actually Pakistan and it had been about three years and then realized with horror that he was going to ask me what I was doing, and that there in that beautiful light, I was going to have to tell Prof. Jaffee that I was in beauty school, a profoundly unorthodox not to mention unacademic course of study. I considered not mentioning it, or even lying but as I told him about work at the Village and all the dance and everything else, I knew that I have to be proud of what I’m doing, and stand behind my decisions no matter who I’m talking to. I didn’t do this accidentally, and I’m not sorry that I’m not in his grad program talking about the history of the Rabbinate. I took a deep breath and spit it out. “…and, this is hard, I’m in Beauty school at Seattle Central” those were my exact words. “You don’t say, what a wonderful life.” That’s what he said. It was the nicest thing I could think of. Then he told me that he would love it if I’d come visit him at UW. Of course I will. It was a pivotal experience, I told him, my times in your classes, I said, are some of my most precious moments. I thought to myself, moments when I knew why my dad even thought he would want to teach at Columbia. Anyway, I left feeling pretty good, like I had been in the right place at the right time. I called Ariel and told her about it. “ Blog it,” She said. Duly blogged.