Scraps

The closest I came to wetting my pants this week was on Friday. They’ve recently decided that, in order to insure that all the students on the clinic floor (and thereby the teachers, which I think was the real impetus) get a break, they will be closing the salon from 11:30 to 12:30. This puts all the students on lunch at the same time. Before the fifth and third quarter students just took breaks when they didn’t have clients, now we are all in the severely inadequate break room at the same time. The other classes, 4th and 5th quarter students are primarily made up of African American women. All of them, save I think two, have kids. All of them, except Miss June who I love, are younger than me. They are hilarious, loud as hell, purposefully intimidating and very stylish. Most of them have classic La'Amaraquah type names. In fact the only boy in their class is a white boy named Casey who wears those roller-skate sneakers as a regular mode of transport, he said he's gonna change his name to La'Casey to fit in better. That killed me. Also, between you and me, he has a really, disproportionately big head. Ms Dolores gave him a haircut on Tuesday as a demo and I couldn’t stop staring at it. Anyway, these sister's hair goes from fades with curls on top to waist length cascades between the time we go into the back classroom at 9 to the time we come out at 11. I’ve seen more speedy glue-on weaves done in that break room . The other thing about the break room is that people eat the most shockingly crappy food on a daily basis. Burger king, deep fried burritos and jojos from the QFC deli counter, ENDLESS fried chicken, ENDLESS Coke and Fanta, buffalo wings, Doritos (the computer knew to capitalize Doritos! Ha, It did it again!), Snickers, M&Ms, donuts, and the Top Ramen, my god the Cup of Noodles! Heavenly Father, I can’t imagine what I would look like, let alone how I would feel. No wonder people get angry so fast. You could be talking to someone, thinking they’re totally normal, maybe even attractive, and the truth is they haven’t consumed one nutrient rich calorie in the past ten fifteen years.
So, Me, Bintu, Noelle, and a few others from my class are sitting around the huge round tables that barely fit in the room, you have to get up for anyone to get in the fridge or use the microwave. Samirah is a really beautiful light skinned young woman who has an eight year old daughter and an amazingly scary way of chatting and joking with you one moment and cutting you to the quick with some well thought out and perfectly unkind comment the next. She and Abena and La'quara and Shannisse were all sitting around another table. Abena is a larger, drop dead foxy dark skinned sister from the east coast. I could listen to her talk for days, she is quick as hell and I know she's the kind of girl who will throw down in a minute. So Noelle is saying something about her husband and Samirah, loud and across the table says "I thought you was married, I didn’t think you were a lesbian!" (Obviously she did though, everyone thought Noelle looked like a lesbian, but Jesus, no one had said anything about it!) Abena: "Now why would you say some shit like that?" Samirah: "Because, I mean I knew she was married and then also I was thinking, she Canadian too so that's why! She aint gay!"
Noelle was like "People have thought that before, I guess it’s the short hair." Which was equally funny, that she didn’t really even know how dykelike she looks. I tried not to make it worse by laughing but I couldn’t help it. She could so easily have just said I thought you were married, and left it at that. So hilarious.
Also funny is Ms Dolores, who taught us clipper cutting and razor cutting this week in Ms Kendra's absence. She talks so much that by the time she is finished telling us the rationale, detailed history and her part in the invention of what she wants us to do I have no idea what we are supposed to be doing. I take direction well, I pride myself on it, but NOBODY (and certainly nobody in my class) could listen to a half an hour lecture on the nature of a cowlick vs. the nature of a whorl and pick out the simple assignment "cut from the top of the brow down, with a #2 guard." It’s inconceivable. She talks fast and as soon as we get started on something she stops us in that "and another thing" style, to add some detail in that we would have found out for ourselves in about ten seconds. She was telling is in detail about how glasses make hair bulge out over your ears if you don’t “plan for them in the sculpture,” i.e. cut the hair a little shorter to go under the earpiece. Understood? I mean I think anyone can envision that without too much mind prep and background. So she takes off her glasses, which are on the end of her nose all the time, I cant imagine how she actually looks through the lenses if they’re that far from her eyes, and goes to put them on the mannequin, so we can all have a visual for the aforementioned, mind boggling “when you put something under something else it can stick up” concept. The thing is, she moves so fast and so erratically that she jammed one earpiece part of her glasses into the side of the wighead, it broke off and fell on the ground. She bent down, examined it, threw it in the trash and put the glasses back on her head, crooked and with only one earpiece, without even slowing the stream of her lecture. I had to leave the room to collect myself. She wore them like that the rest of the day. Clipper cutting is hard and unforgiving, but by the end of the day it was starting to be fun. Nathan is already really good at it, and he sits next to me now so he helped me a lot. He has been clipper-cutting hair since he was in sixth grade. He can still learn a lot from Ms D (according to her, she invented the concept of carving designs into men’s hair, took it to NY where it “took off”) but he is way ahead of the rest of us. I imagine Romy would have been too, but I heard his female stole all of his school supplies and tools, so he couldn’t come in to class. Now he’s missed so much at this point that he cant even make it up. He’d have to start over and he wouldn’t be eligible for financial aid. Another one bites the dust. Its deep how we keep each other down.
Oh yeah, to practice the clipper cuts we had to take these rubber mask head things with crew cuts and stretch them over the bald mannequin heads so we didn’t waste our long haired ones practicing. I can tell you now, surveying the scene of everyone stretching these unbelievably creepy peeled head looking masks over the faces of these disembodied heads was surreal. They didn’t glide on easily either, talc was needed as was great force and at least half an hour. I need a smaller head , you dig? That’s what Nathan said. Fun-ny. Besides that, the week was short due to our heavenly day off on Tuesday (the only day all week the sun wasn’t out, thanks so much), and the rest of it crawled by anyway. I got a tremendous amount of stuff done on Tuesday, including paying $175 smackers for Sizzla’s new tabs. Goddammit, Tim Eyman! What was all that $35 noise about anyway?
I did give frigmate and birthday twin Jason a haircut and beard trim on Thursday in anticipation of his sister’s Saturday wedding. I did a uniform layer cut, as he wanted to keep some of the length, but fend off his family’s complaints that he looked to have “gone native.” I could have taken off more length or added some more texture, but decided to keep it on the conservative side as it would be immortalized in the wedding photos forever and I could easily see some sort of Seinfeldian scenario unfolding about the bad haircut before the wedding. Maybe next time? His hair looked great anyway and we followed it with a fab night on the town in belated celebration of our birthday. Despite all Seattle constraints, it was fun. The Chapel has a cool upstairs part that I never knew about. If you like screaming over house music, you’ll love it.
Next week I think we’re starting to learn color theory. I can’t wait! Ready girls? I’ll need guinea pigs, I mean models!