by Susan Orlean
NAT (eyeing the cookies): I always say to my customers, “It’s easy to take in, it’s not so easy to let out.” When they keep coming to me for letting out, sometimes I tell them they need a dietitian, not a tailor. Of course, I let my own pants out. Periodically. Since I stopped smoking. Have a cookie! You could gain two ounces, it wouldn’t kill you.
MOTHER ADLER: Wonderful cookies. It’s a lovely bakery on Broadway. You should try their candy cake if you’re having company over sometime. By the way, I should mention that we have specials here all the time—shirt specials, Lotto specials, rug-cleaning specials. This is a real family place. We love to accommodate. When Gary was on his quest for a business, I said, “Gary, find a business where you can accommodate.” And I said, “Gary, when times are tough, people don’t buy suits, they clean them.”
NAT: I can tell you this. Of all the dry-cleaning establishments I’ve seen in this city, and I assure you I’ve seen quite a few, this is the most unique one. I used to walk by here four, five times a day when it first opened and just stare in the window. These are progressive young people with a whole new concept about a dry-cleaning establishment. I am not exaggerating when I say that no other tailor in the entire city of New York has a situation like mine. We have a whole department here! We have so much room! There are two of us tailors, me and (points across the room to a dark-haired young man bent over a sewing machine) my young friend over here from the Soviet Union. I know the other tailors on the avenue. I consult with them on an informal basis. It’s not for me to say they’re jealous, but I am sure that I’m the object of some—how would you put it?—envy.
GARY (leaning over conspiratorially): That’s something else you should know about Nat. A lot of tailors wouldn’t work with another tailor. You’re dealing with ego, with feelings, with conflict. For him, it’s not a problem. (To Nat) Nat, would you say you have charisma?
NAT: That’s not for me to say. Work is work. I will say I’ve got a following. I will say I’m known. I will say I have quite a lot of loyal customers. I will say I take care of them. They need me, because they need alteration. Also, I have a family that needs alteration.
SPLURGE
SO THERE’S THIS HUSBAND and wife, and one day they decide to go to Saks Fifth Avenue. They walk over to the store and end up in designer handbags. Before you know it, the wife is checking out the merchandise. Right away, the husband’s getting nervous. Suddenly, he notices this pleasant-looking gray-haired woman behind the counter. This woman, believe it or not, happens to be Judith Leiber, the most famous designer of designer handbags, who is making an in-store appearance with her fall collection. For those of you who just recently fell off the turnip truck, a Leiber handbag is tiny, rhinestone encrusted, and shaped like something cute—maybe a bird, or a panda, or a butterfly, or an egg—and is also, we mean to tell you, not cheap. A Leiber panda, say, runs three thousand bucks. Anyhow, the wife falls in love with the panda and then takes a deep interest in an egg bag, too, so the husband starts hyperventilating. Maybe she’s a new wife, maybe she’s an old wife—what’s the difference? He just knows she’s getting hung up on these three-thousand-dollar little handbags and he’s going to have to do something quick. Finally, the husband—he’s sweating now—says to Mrs. Leiber, “Hey, look, if I buy two, would I get a special price?”
Mrs. Leiber looks him in the eye and says, “No, but we would thank you very nicely.”
Okay, okay, so there’s a priest, a rabbi, and—No, seriously, there’s a reporter who walks into Saks Fifth Avenue this same day and heads over to the Judith Leiber counter, jots down a few notes about the handbags, and then goes up to Mrs. Leiber and says, “Listen, I was wondering. You were born in Hungary and learned to make handbags there, and then came to this country in 1947 and went into the handbag industry in New York, and then started your own company in 1963, designing and manufacturing luxury evening bags that have become the must-have status object for certain women, and you have fans who own dozens and dozens of your designs, including a fan in New Orleans who lent fifty of her Leibers for a show at the New Orleans Museum of Art a few years ago. But what I was wondering was: What sort of handbag do you carry?”
So Mrs. Leiber looks at the reporter and says, “One of my own, of course. Either that or a paper bag. And I won’t carry a paper bag, so you figure it out.”
But seriously, now—another husband and wife come up to the counter. The wife is going crazy for the handbags, and the husband is doing the death grip on his wallet when he notices Mrs. Leiber. So he says to her, “Are you Mrs. Leiber? I’ve long been an admirer of yours.”
Mrs. Leiber says to him, “Oh, really?”
The husband says, “Actually, my wife more than me.”
Mrs. Leiber says, “That’s good. You shouldn’t be carrying handbags. You’re not the type.”
Could you die?
All right, it’s the same afternoon, and this skinny woman in thigh-high boots and a baggy sweatshirt comes up to the counter. She’s here to meet Mrs. Leiber, but also she decided when she woke up this morning that life is short and, God willing, today she’s going to splurge and buy a Judith Leiber pillbox. The pillboxes are also tiny and rhinestone encrusted and shaped like pandas and what have you. Anyhow, this hippie type is looking at the pillboxes, and she says to the saleswoman, “Do you have any pillboxes that are bigger? I mean, these are exquisite, but I need something bigger, because I take a lot of vitamins.”
So the saleswoman says to her, “We do have one shaped like an egg, which holds quite a lot.”
Mrs. Sweatshirt-and-Thigh-Highs looks at her and says, “Hey, maybe I should just eat an egg. That way I wouldn’t need the vitamins or the pillbox!”
You cannot make this stuff up.
Okay, now, the afternoon is rolling along, and Mrs. Leiber is the center of attention—some Japanese women have their picture taken with her, and a lot of Saks brass come to pay their respects, because, after all, she’s got a lot of real estate on the first floor. Are you still with us? So two young women in those it-wasn’t-enough-for-me-to-have-a-lovely-husband-and-children-I-had-to-have-a-career suits come up to Mrs. Leiber, and one of them says, “Mrs. Leiber, you make me so happy. I want to thank you for doing what you do.”
Mrs. Leiber looks at her and says, “Please. Don’t thank me. Buy.”
The other young woman says, “Mrs. Leiber, I just love coming to see your bags. It’s like going to a museum.”
Mrs. Leiber looks at her and says, “Sweetie, you have it all wrong. Believe me. These are to own, not to be in a museum.”
Did you hear, by the way, the one about the Leiber pig bag? This is one of her new designs—a fat little pig covered with pink rhinestones, hinged at the haunches, and with a grin on his face. Hey, you’d be grinning, too, if you cost three thousand dollars, right? Anyway, the pig is the big hit of the day. One woman picks it up and says, “I’ve got to have this, even if it’s trayf.” Another one says, “Take a look at this, he’s even got cloven hooves. Is that biologically right?” Another one finally puts her MasterCard where her mouth is. She picks up the pink pig and hands it and her card to the saleswoman standing next to Mrs. Leiber and says, “My husband’s going to kill me, but I’m going to die if I don’t get this, so, the way I see it, I’m going to go one way or the other, right?”
The saleswoman takes the pig and the credit card, and then she pulls Mrs. Leiber over for a private moment and says, “Mrs. Leiber, this pink pig is just a sample. Maybe we should keep it.”
Mrs. Leiber looks at her, looks at the pig, looks at the customer, looks back at the saleswoman, rolls her eyes, catches her breath, and finally says, “Darling, please. Don’t give me a heart attack. Sell the pig. There’s more where that came from.”
LAST FRONTIER
BELIEVE IT OR NOT, Alan Abel, the man who masterminded that fake $35 million-dollar lottery winner a few weeks ago, pulled the stunt for humanitarian reasons. Mr. Abel is a square-built middle-aged man who has a low cen
ter of gravity, gray-brown hair, longish sideburns, pointy eyebrows, and a gigantic, mobile smile that turns slightly sheepish when he drops one-liners like “I’ve given up smoking until this lung cancer scare blows over.” It is entirely possible to imagine him, Art Buchwald, and Allan Sherman in a room somewhere giving one another noogies. Mr. Abel says that he is a fundamentally serious person, however, and one recent afternoon he could be found wearing a sane as anything midlevel-executive outfit—navy blazer, gray slacks, loafers—and looking contemplative as he sat in his office, which is a brick-red train caboose parked in his backyard, in Westport. Mr. Abel retires to the caboose when he wants to devise new pranks. “I find it easy to come up with nonsense,” he explained, settling onto a lumpy couch that takes up about half the caboose. “This is a good place to work—it’s a good place for me to think about exploring the mind. The mind is the last frontier. I like to play, and my friends and my mind are my toys.”
How do the humanitarian considerations fit into the last frontier? It was Mr. Abel’s opinion that the public was sick and tired of seeing every lottery jackpot end up in the hands of some pipe-fitter-from-Queens type, and that most people playing the lottery were getting traumatized by always losing—sometimes by just one or two digits—and he figured that everyone would be cheered up if there were to be a young winner with long hair and a glossy smile, so he provided one. Mr. Abel would also like to take credit for the aliens in Russia last summer. He claims he had been sitting around in the caboose worrying that they didn’t have any fun in Russia, and that there had never been a UFO spotted there, so he sent detailed plans for a spaceship and aliens to a couple of Russians he had listed in his hoax-lovers Rolodex. “What I do is give people a kick in the intellect,” Mr. Abel is fond of saying. “I like a big audience. If I’d been born five hundred years ago, I’d have been a court jester. If I had a lot of money and if I were an evil person, I could take over the world. My hope is that people see the sociological significance of what I do. This is a mental exercise. No banana peels, no buckets of water falling on people’s heads, no whoopee cushions—that’s low class.”
That afternoon, Mr. Abel was still fielding calls from around the world about the lottery prank. To date, he has successfully published his own fake obituary (the Times, 1980), passed off phony organizations, including Females for Felons, Omar’s School for Panhandlers, Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, and the International Sex Bowl Olympics (many talk shows, many years), and trick-or-treated his own neighbors (Westport, the eighties). He may or may not have put a phony referee in a football game (Super Bowl XVII, Redskins vs. Dolphins, 1983), and brought a faux Salman Rushdie out of hiding (American Booksellers Association convention, 1989). But for some reason the lottery prank has proved to be his biggest hit. “This was the whopper—the media loved it,” Mr. Abel said. “They loved having someone pretty and pleasant as a winner, for a change, and Lee Chirillo, the actress who played the part of the winner, was very good at it. When the electronic media jumped in so fast—whew, I honestly wasn’t expecting such a big blast. How do you arrange something like the lottery hoax? It’s really simple. I just wrote a script and then rounded up my group of merry pranksters, and we each chipped in a hundred and fifty dollars for a room at the Omni Park Central Hotel and champagne, and then we faxed the wire services saying we had the winner. Before we started, I said to my pranksters, ‘Look, we’ll produce this scenario and we’ll party. Whatever happens happens.’ Most of my pranksters are actors and actresses with day jobs. I’ve always got along best with people younger than I am. We had a great time.”
Mr. Abel stood up, stepped over to a desk, picked up a set of drumsticks, and began pounding out a beat on a drum pad. “Basic rock beat!” he yelled over the drumming. “Easy as anything! Anyone can do it!” That answered a question a lot of people have about major league hoaxsters like Mr. Abel: How does the guy make a living? “I teach drumming!” he yelled. “I teach a class called Learn to Drum!” He segued into the drumbeat of “Bolero,” and then put down the drumsticks and said, “I also teach a class in comedy to people with no sense of humor, called Learn to Be Funny. I show them how to do things like—oh, if they’re shy, I suggest they take a bunch of hard-boiled eggs to a party and surreptitiously slip them into people’s pockets and handbags. It’s an icebreaker. I’ve composed and published sixteen pieces of concert music. My wife and I directed a very successful movie called Is There Sex After Death? starring Buck Henry, and we made a lot of money with that. I’ve written many books, and I’m working on one right now called Abel Raises Cain. I’m in the creative field. I also teach a class called Don’t Get Mad—Get Even. My philosophy is that it’s healthier to give ulcers than to get them.”
Mr. Abel named P. T. Barnum and Jonathan Swift as his greatest sources of inspiration, and went on to say, “My mother had no sense of humor whatsoever. My father, though, was a very flamboyant general-store owner in a small town in Ohio. He’d do things like put a big lump of worthless glass in the window with a sign saying, ‘Come in and Find Out About This,’ and people would. He’d put ‘Limit—Two to a Customer’ in front of the things that wouldn’t sell, and they’d be gone in a minute. Maybe the learning experience in this is that you shouldn’t believe everything you read. I don’t. When people tell me I’m crazy, I say, ‘Me crazy? You know what I think is crazy? I think bowling is crazy—taking a ball and rolling it down the floor. That’s crazy. Exploring the mind is not crazy.’ ”
EXTENSIONS
BARBARA TERRY’S DREAM: Several years ago, Barbara Terry dreamed she was walking along Seventh Avenue in Harlem and saw dozens of women parading down the street in fancy clothes, looking great except that the backs of their heads were missing. A voice then said to her, “Barbara, you have to do their hair!” Ms. Terry said, “How?” and the voice answered, “You have to braid it.” Ms. Terry then woke up, went to the store, bought a sixty-four-ounce Pepsi, went over to her mother’s house, woke up her little sister, cut up an old wig, braided the wig hairs into her sister’s hair so that it was styled into eight braids, and realized that she had just invented extension hair braiding—the use of synthetic fibers to extend short, broken-off, overprocessed hair and make it more manageable. About that experience Ms. Terry now says, “I’m a person who really gets into her dreams.”
HAIR FACTS, ABOUT AND ACCORDING TO BARBARA TERRY: Her grandfather was a barber in the Panama Canal Zone. Her father ran Nelson’s Tonsorial Parlor in the Bronx. As a child, Ms. Terry would walk around with a comb in her pocket, and let’s say she was talking to you, and your bangs had got messed up—she’d just whip out her comb and fix them for you. As a young woman, in 1961, she invented the Afro when she was rushing out for a date: She didn’t have time to hot-press and curl her hair, so she let it dry naturally and fluffed it out, and then found she preferred it that way. People used to stop their cars and curse her for wearing an Afro. She started wearing dreadlocks a few years later, when she was in a hurry to get to Harlem after hearing about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and decided to twist her hair into separate clumpy sections and let it dry. People used to stop their cars and curse her for wearing dreadlocks. Some friends of hers who live in the Poconos told her recently that putting a circle of hair clippings around the edge of their property seemed to scare the deer away. “I could have made a gazillion dollars by now if I’d been saving hair clippings and selling them to people upstate,” Ms. Terry says. “With extension braiding, though, I’m more interested in putting hair on people’s heads than in taking it off.”
CERTAIN THINGS A PROFESSIONAL HAIR BRAIDER KNOWS FOR SURE: The other afternoon, Ms. Terry was in her apartment, in the Bronx, along with T’Vohnah Benyahmeen, to whom she was teaching extension braiding on a mannequin head named Betty. Betty’s hair was chestnut colored with bleached spots; it appeared to have been whacked off somewhat randomly. Ms. Terry’s hair, which is about 70 percent her own and 30 percent extensions, was arranged in what she descr
ibed as “a few hundred individual plaits worn with a little slide bang, with a pompadour and a side ponytail.” Ms. Benyahmeen, whose braids had been done by Ms. Terry about a month earlier, was wearing them pulled up into what Ms. Terry described as “a kind of Nordic, I Remember Mama wholesome, cute kind of I’m-not-going-to-misbehave kind of thing.” While the two women were braiding monocrylic fibers from a package marked “California Fashions Coarsened Braid” into Betty’s hair, they discussed the hair issue as it pertains to some well-known individuals.
Ms. Benyahmeen: “Janet Jackson?”
Ms. Terry: “Not her real hair.”
“Whitney Houston?”
“That’s not her hair.”
“Robin Givens? When she was dating Mike Tyson?”
“That’s not her hair.”
“Patti LaBelle?”
“Everyone knows that’s not her hair.”
HISTORICALLY AND FACTUALLY SPEAKING: Extension braids can be styled as African string curls, Egyptian twists, Senegalese twists, Nubian twists, basic cornrows, individual plaits, and New York pix, or they can be fashioned using the interlock method, which Ms. Terry happens to hate and doesn’t like to do. “I’ve revised my technique six times,” she says. “My system is called the Songa Original Undetectable Extension Hair Braiding Technique. The whole point of it is neatness. When you take a scrambled mess of hair and make an ordered creation out of it, that’s a work of art. Woolly hair is very unusual. It can be woolly or straight: If you shape it into a duck when it’s wet, it’ll dry in the shape of a duck. It’s very sensitive to humidity: If you’re wearing an Afro on a humid night, you might go to a party looking like Angela Davis and leave looking like Miriam Makeba. Your hair might change shape in the middle of a sentence. Extension braiding gives it length and structure and lets you do anything with it. It takes hours to get braided, but the braids last six or eight weeks, through dozens of shampoos, and during that time you can get on with your life. While I’m braiding, I say to myself, ‘This lady has come to me looking like a plucked chicken and I want to help her.’ I’m the pioneer extension braider in the country. I’ve written a book about it, called Professional Secrets: How to Do Extension Hair Braiding. I used to have two salons in Harlem, and one was open twenty-four hours a day. While we braiders were working, we’d turn on the television and discuss and debate Oprah, or we’d put on old tapes of the show I host on cable television, called Harlem Here It Is. I closed my salons when Reagan came into office, because I knew no one would have any money. Now I teach braiders, lecture about braiding, and wholesale my braid-care products, and I’m opening my Songa Too salon franchises in Florida, Ohio, and Chicago. I’d like to open a museum of African beauty in Harlem. Black people ruined their hair pressing and perming it, all because they were trying to look like Donna Reed. That’s over. Extension braiding is the biggest thing since bubble gum.”
