“He was so huge, I didn’t know where to put it . . .”
“That bitch in the red leather was all over him like a cheap suit . . .”
“We just went home, dropped some Mandrax, and fucked our brains out . . .”
The comments would be flying thick and fast while I kept my ears open and beaded their G-strings. Even though the conversation veered wildly between the raunchy and the banal, it was just girl talk, focusing on the daily grind and goings-on of some regular Auntie Mames. Nothing was ever hidden and their authenticity about who they were and who they wanted to be—even when they were dressing in outrageous costumes and putting on makeup to create an illusion for their audiences—has informed how I’ve conducted my own life.
My first job doing hair was actually backstage at the clubs. Without a personal stylist of any sort, the drag queens eagerly taught me how to pin-curl, hot-roller, and comb out their wigs for them. It was an auspicious start to my long and eventful career as a hairstylist, showing me that how you make someone look on the outside has everything to do with how he or she feels on the inside. Too many people live their lives according to external or societal perceptions of who, what, and how they should be. They act phony because who they truly are doesn’t please their parents, partner, friends, work colleagues . . . sometimes not even themselves.
Invariably honest with my clients, I’m also aware that, every time they sit in my chair, a lot of what they say about how they want to look or how they perceive themselves is based on the rubbish that other people have told them. “I want to look thinner, I want to look younger, I want to look like Jennifer Aniston.” If they were just more honest with themselves and real about who they are, they probably wouldn’t posture with such bullshit.
I totally understand and accept that we all have to observe certain social conventions to get through life—if I said every last thing that’s on my mind, I’d probably be locked up! However, if you know who you are, stay true to your beliefs, and do what feels comfortable to you as a person, it will pay off in the image that you project and in the people you attract. Authenticity is the most attractive quality a person can have. It’s great when someone’s appearance is an accurate reflection of who he or she is on the inside. However, authenticity is not only about looks. In a world where some people will yes you to death and be nice to your face while talking shit behind your back, it’s also about meaning what you say, saying what you mean, and being comfortable with who you are.
Posers and phonies need not apply.
How to Be a Real BITCH
• Bravery is standing up for what you believe in, even if it is unpopular; it is having the courage to trust yourself because you should know yourself better than anyone else does; and it’s having the balls to change what you don’t like, including yourself, or else you’ll just walk around, whinging like a wuss.
• Intelligence is not just being smart. Book smarts are great and street smarts are just as valuable. But real intelligence comes from trusting yourself and listening to yourself; it is knowing when to take a risk and it is knowing when to shut the fuck up. And real intelligent people, men and women, aren’t afraid to let others know that they are intelligent. Acting “dumb” to make other people feel more secure is . . . dumb. Don’t do it.
• Tenacity is never giving up on yourself or your dreams; it is telling people to shove their opinions up their arse when they’re trying to deter or dissuade you from what you want or need; and it is standing firm when you really believe in something. Frankly, it is being a dog with a bone. It is the dogs with bones who change the world. So forget what other people think or say.
• Creativity doesn’t mean you have to be an impressionist painter or a novelist. You can bring creativity into whatever you do in your work and in your life. Creativity is a way of thinking about yourself in the world. It’s not settling for the path most traveled because it is easy or obvious. Sometimes you need to think out of the box and try something no one has ever done before. You need to challenge yourself to create new ideas, new ways, and new things, regardless of what you do for a living. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs aren’t “artists” in the traditional sense, but their wild creativity has changed the way we understand the world. And we should all aspire to that.
• Honesty isn’t just about telling other people the truth. It’s also about telling yourself the truth. Sometimes you’ll feel compelled to sugarcoat things or avoid the truth when it might hurt, but that is the coward’s way out. I am not saying you should be mean or say things that won’t help the person or the situation. But I am a big proponent of telling it like it is even when the truth can be brutal because the truth helps people be better and it does, in fact, set you free.
Chapter 2
Fitting the Fat Peg into the Skinny Hole
I WAS ALWAYS THE fat kid. Not a bit chunky around the edges, but obese, and this created all sorts of issues at school, right down to my uniform, which, as I already mentioned, was an absolute disaster. Manufactured for someone several years older than me, it would have to be drastically shortened to match my height and undergo all kinds of other alterations so that the rest of it fit. It wasn’t pretty. And, I suppose, I wasn’t either, at least in the eyes of my classmates. However, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I beheld myself just fine . . . while enjoying good food and a lot of it.
In terms of my diet, quantity was the issue, not quality. I didn’t eat a lot of junk food, but I did eat far too much of everything else, and Mum, who was also heavy, cooked most of my meals. Whereas the other kids would get a sandwich for lunch at the school “tuck shop,” I might have a generous helping of roast chicken and mashed potatoes along with a slab of homemade chocolate cake. There was little moderation, and I paid the price—usually in the swimming pool. Getting into my togs was a frigging nightmare, especially since I had to do so in front of my classmates. As I’d make my way toward the pool, some of them would snicker, “Here comes Orca.” I wished I was faster on my feet so I could have bulldozed the bloody lot of them into the deep end. Asthma didn’t help my sporting prowess either, and when puberty endowed me with breasts at the age of ten, I stood out from the other girls in more ways than one. The hard times weren’t limited to the kids either. One time I went to the PE teacher, who was also our German instructor, and told her I wasn’t feeling well and needed to sit out. She told me I was just fat and lazy and made me go back and keep pace with the other kids. After gym class, my mum had to pick me up at the curb, where I had collapsed into a full-on asthma attack.
I didn’t feel stigmatized. I hated being teased, but I also didn’t really care to befriend my peers, so I suppose the disdain went both ways. In fact, I didn’t have any friends my age and I didn’t socialize at school, which meant that I was bored most of the time and this concerned my parents. There weren’t that many kids in our neighborhood, but one day I overheard Dad talking to a kid on the street in front of our house. He had stopped the kid to offer him cash to play with me. I was rather horrified, mostly because I didn’t want to get stuck playing with someone my own age.
But despite the tortures of school, my parents did try to reassure me that my “puppy fat” would go away. At the clubs the girls just treated me like a smart and beautiful little person who did a fine job of setting their wigs and beading their clothes. Well aware that other, average kids didn’t hang out with drag queens, I felt certain that their lives weren’t nearly as interesting as mine and I judged them as harshly or perhaps more harshly than they judged me. After all, they were just boring kids and I was living a really interesting life filled with really interesting adults.
One of the many things I learned from growing up around those queens was that you have to march to the beat of your own drum and fuck anyone who doesn’t like the rhythm. I would have staked my life on some of those strippers being women. But others with deeper voices and more masculine features were exposed to terrible ridicule while just trying to be themselves in the da
ytime world. Confronted by gay bashers who called them pooftahs at the gas station or grocery store, the “girls” always had a “fuck you, I’m comfortable with myself” attitude—even when, at times, they’d get the crap beaten out of them. Their “difference” sometimes put them in real danger, but they marched to their own beat anyway, and I learned to adopt this attitude when dealing with schoolkids who picked on me for being unfit or ostracized me because they thought my fat might be contagious, like a case of the “cooties.”
None of the strippers ever judged me or spoke down to me. Since I treated them the way they wanted to be treated and fully accepted them as beautiful women, they responded in kind. There was mutual empathy and understanding, and that’s why I was way more comfortable around them than with a bunch of mundane kids whose idea of fun was trying to come up with lame insults. My favorite activities were more creative than that, whether I was playing beauty shop with an imaginary friend, dressing my Barbie dolls and—now here’s a surprise—styling their hair, or attending ballet, tap, and Spanish dance classes. Having seen the strippers in action, my favorite activities were invariably theatrical . . . I loved a touch of drama almost as much as I loved a piece of chocolate cake.
One time, while my classmates were trying to come up with parts for a school play, I sat onstage in front of a makeup mirror and performed Judy Garland’s “Born in a Trunk.” To them, that was weird; to me, it made perfect sense. I loved the film A Star Is Born and I also loved being in the clubs, so borrowing from both seemed perfectly natural. What I didn’t love was being around kids because I really wasn’t one. Even as the baby of the family, I lived in a grown-up world, and the rejection by my peers simply confirmed that I was different. It didn’t bother me. Quite the reverse. In fact, I was more than happy to be nothing like them and started working harder to differentiate myself from them by acting and dressing differently.
For their part, my parents always perceived me as different because I was an original, independent thinker. For example, we had religious education at my primary school, and when I was seven a teacher threw me out of class for asking, “How did Mary have Jesus if she was still a virgin?” That was good different; the kind of different that made me more interesting. I mean, at five years old, when most other girls my age were dreaming of a princess dress, I was telling Mum that if I ever got married, I’d wear a strapless black lace wedding gown with a fishtail—clearly, those queens were very influential.
Just a few years later, I spotted a copy of French Vogue at the newsstand and begged Dad to buy it for me. It was a huge, incredibly expensive magazine and I couldn’t understand a word that was printed in it, but the glossy cover was amazing, and as I flipped through it I was immediately enamored of the glamour. I reveled in the pictures of beautiful clothes, beautiful hairstyles, and beautiful makeup adorning the equally beautiful people. I wanted to live inside that magazine and I vowed that someday I would.
Thanks to the self-confidence instilled in me by my drag queen aunties, I came to realize that if I am different and I am unusual, that’s a good thing. Many people are apprehensive about change and scared of being different, but I’ve yet to find one global definition of what it means to be “normal.” In fact, we’re all different, so I don’t know what “normal” is, and what’s more, I actually like to undermine people’s ideas of “normal.” That can be very liberating.
As a teenager, faced with the ridicule of my cruel insecure peers, I decided to embrace being different by wearing unusual, fabulous clothes, putting unique outfits together, doing crazy things to my hair, and generally being my own person. That’s what I did to feel comfortable with myself instead of trying to lose weight in order to “fit in.” As far as I was concerned, fuck fitting in!
Accustomed to people staring at me because I was fat, I didn’t think it was odd for them to do the same when I walked down the street with writing all over my face because that, for me, was the cool new look. I thought it was brilliant—“Here’s something for you to bloody look at!” And when all the staring started to get old, I was eager to find a place like the clubs where people embraced differences. When I was eighteen, I took a brief hairdressing course in London and was delighted to discover people who were refreshingly different and totally into it, too. After returning to Australia, I couldn’t get the bug out of my arse about the English capital, so I decided to move there and have an adventure.
I loved the challenge of trying to succeed in another country, and I also acquired a taste for travel thanks to my quest for all things unique and exciting. Of course, the English enjoyed giving me a hard time when they first heard my accent, calling me “the Convict” in reference to the more than 165,000 prisoners whom the British had transported to the Australian penal colonies during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, I had no problem with the ribbing because Australians have one of the brashest senses of humor out there. We make fun of everybody, including ourselves, so when I was told that I’d come home to the “motherland,” I always took it with a grain of salt. The piss-talking wasn’t being done in a malicious way and I loved the people I was meeting in my new city.
The extreme ways in which Londoners crafted their looks inspired and influenced me. I loved to ride around on the double-deckers and just people-watch. The punks mixed in with the trendy girls as well as with the Sloane Rangers. And the English had such an amazing way of not taking any frigging notice of anybody around them. It really didn’t matter what I looked like; no one judged me no matter how crazy I appeared, and I never felt like I stood out, at least not in a bad way. I loved that. I was experimental with my clothes and especially with my hair, but no one so much as batted an eyelid. Still chubby, I lost any self-consciousness about this because I was expressing myself so freely and I was finally around really amazing hairdressers who were inspiring me in my profession.
Working for Vidal Sassoon and then Toni & Guy, I got the training that other stylists in Australia always talked about but were too scared to pursue. And when I was hairdressing, I wasn’t the fat kid or the outsider; I was a rock star, and I liked being a rock star. Not that it was always easy. When I was the head colorist at one of Toni & Guy’s salons, coworkers still took digs at me for being fat. My response was always, “I may be fat, but I am really good at what I do.” And frankly, they were taking the cheap shot because they knew how good I was and they wanted my position.
I’m not romanticizing my time in London. It was tough on many levels. I was making very little money and I lived in a shit-hole apartment in Kensington. The weather was freezing cold, and I had to put 50p into a slot to keep the heat on and the water hot. When I ran out of money, I’d quite literally be left out in the cold. What’s more, I didn’t know some of the English regimens, such as queueing, and when I cut in front of somebody they had no problem telling me, “Get to the back of the line, you fat cow!”
“Fuck off!” I’d respond. “I may be fat, but at least I’m not ugly!” That was the beauty of London. You could always say your piece.
Most Londoners had an “anything goes” attitude, just like in my parents’ clubs. Whether you wanted to shave your head in public or stand in the middle of the street to speak your mind, they’d just roll their eyes and keep walking. Eccentricity was so much a part of the social fabric that no one even perceived it as unusual—others with less open minds might have condemned the geeks, gays, cross-dressers, you name it, but not in London.
Another thing that made me feel right at home was the stiff upper lip that even the younger generation of English possessed. If something needed to be done, they got on with it, and that suited me down to the ground. Sure, they might whinge and bitch about something for a few seconds, but it didn’t mean a whole lot because they’d still end up doing what had to be done. They weren’t namby-pamby. And when shit fell apart, they’d conform to the old English joke “Let’s have a cup of tea and everything will be fine.” That’s exactly my attitude—if you have a bad min
ute, sit down, have a cup of tea, regroup, and then move forward to make it right.
That’s one of the reasons why I wasn’t one to wallow in my weight or in being the fat kid at school. I ate what I wanted and did what I wanted, and I didn’t give a shit about what the other kids called me. But when I was really fat, I have to admit that I was also lazy and didn’t bother to push away from the table or exercise, even though I knew I could shed some of the weight and probably be more “popular.” I didn’t want to be popular and so I had no motivation. It was always a case of “Monday, I’ll do it,” and when Monday came I would then think, “Oh, fuck, I forgot. I’ll do it next Monday . . .” I was never serious about exercising, and whenever I made the effort to diet, it wouldn’t last longer than a couple of weeks. I’d miss my chips or going out to dinner with friends. Never mind the insults; it was more important to be who I felt I was and to eat what I wanted at the time.
I lacked self-discipline then, and it wasn’t until I grew older that self-discipline became an important part of who I am, too. I really started exercising when I came to America. At first it was for all the wrong reasons. I wanted to belong and make friends. But as I became thinner and fitter, I found that I liked who I was more and more. I was working with a personal trainer who really pushed me and didn’t let me get away with any bullshit. No more excuses like “Oh I forgot.” I didn’t want to let him down or disappoint him, so I kept at it and became really healthy in the process. I took the thing I hated and turned it into my friend. Eventually, I even got certified to be a personal trainer myself. Exercise turned into something I loved and craved, and I was a different person when I did it—not just on the outside but on the inside, too. The thing about being yourself is that your self is always evolving, and this will often surprise you.
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