Enyce

greetings from brooklyn, where i now reside. things you already know about new york: its huge, dirty, humid, crowded and fun. things you may not already know about new york: cuts take longer to heal, no one here is from here, english is a dying language, asian people's driving is rivaled by the hasidim, a lot of the train change notices put up in the stations are totally wrong, and the first thing you have to know about doing hair on the upper east side is how to give a killer blow out. I know this from now first hand experience. Here's how. THe first day i got here, it was the day of Mahdis huge birthday party. Since mahdis is to networking as the bush administration is to terrible descisions about natural disaster anyone who is anyone in the nyc social justice/artsy fartsy realm was there. especially if theyre iranian. we spent the day getting ready for the party. the brooklyn costco is undescribable. its cramped, for starters, imagine a cramped costco. you have to take your cart on a special cart-friendly escalator to get from floor to floor. ANother thing you may not know about new york is that people have no sense of where other people are in regards to them, they meander in front of you, stop in the middle of doorways, and stand right on top of you in a large space. maybe theyre just so used to being crowded that if theres space they just create their own crowd. who knows, but it makes for some hilarious scenes. especially when giant shopping carts are involved.this one woman stopped dead in the main exit of costco right after the checkout lines, causing a massive shopper pileup. right when i was wishing that carts had horns and i could lay on mine, the bleach blonde older lady behind me said in a laughably brooklyn accent "what in the hell is going on up there?" i told her someone had just stopped in her tracks. "oh thats fu*king perfect. I hate people. I hate coming here." It was so over the top. So anyway. THe adorable italian guy who does mahdis hair came to her huge williamsburg loft party that spilled out on to the industrial block in the humid cool of the night. He brought one of the owners of the salon he is working in, an israeli guy who told me that i should come in and see him the next day. Mahdis told me she had told them about me. I went in and visited the salon. ITs very nice and almost totally jewish. thats why the blowouts are so key. all these jewish women with long coarse curly hair want to look like sarah jessica parker and jennifer aniston. plus all the old upper east side jewish ladies who traded in their roller sets for blowouts. I brought Ariel in first. Maybe not a great idea since her hair looks way worse blown out than curly and has a tendancy to be uncontrollably frizzy. He was unimpressed with my blowout, and i was crazy nervous, which is totally unlike me. Not a rousing success, but i could tell he liked me. So I came back the next day with Mahdis and did her hair. Equally unimpressed, whoever shampooed her didnt get her hair clean enough, and he wanted to see it without product, I made it have flips at the bottom when he felt he had told me he wanted it bone straight. It was a little humiliating. But, her hair did look good, and it didnt take me too long and I was wearing a big huge star of david (what? i wear it all the time! it didnt hurt, I admit!) He decided that while he thinks I have a lot of potential, i have a lot to learn and am not ready for him to have me on the floor. to be honest i felt the same way. from what he said i think he had the idea that i had been a stylist for a long time in seattle and i was just transferring to new york. In seattle, there is far less emphasis on the blowout, its almost never a service unto itself. For white ladies, its the finish of a haircut or color, black ladies get it before a curl, so the actual blowout isnt that key. Seattleites feel able to wash our own hair, i guess, and you know its going to rain so getting it all straight and bouncy to the tune of 50 bucks and having it last for 12 hours 8 of them REM would be an excercise in frustration. In any case, I couldnt feel less ready to take on feisty jewish women who micro manage every hair, especially those with more bling than DeBeers, and I would like to learn much more about color and the whole NY style before i put myself out there as a stylist. he said he would be happy to hire me as an assistant and let me start that way, having my friends come in as clients and watching and assisting the stylists. pretty much what i was doing at RL. so thats a potential job. i want to check out a couple other places and some makeup gigs first but, i think if i can get over my natural aversion to the israeli combative personality it would be a great place to start. did i mention the guys' name is Vivi? His name is Vivi. His other salon is Salon Vivi. WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?? A truly bizarre cooincidence.
i went to connecticut last night to visit a friend who i didnt get to see after all and to see mahdis friend who just had darling twins. We had a nice drive, lots of singing along, some lindt chocolate buying at the outlet mall (70% cocoa is flipping fabulous! why is milk chocolate so popular? its a conspiracy, THEY DONT WANT YOU TO KNOW!!) and a lovely visit with her friend and her friend's husband, both of whom were glowing with parenthood and anticipation for their new ways of life to come. It was a lovely respite from NYC chaos.