B004HD61JU EBOK

by Coffey, Tabatha

  I’ve also learned to ask questions. One of my clients is incredibly adventurous with her hair, and when she got pregnant with her second child, she told me, “I want to cut my hair off. I’m about to have the baby and I want my hair really short.”

  So we discussed how she wanted it and I cut it. When she looked in the mirror, she burst into tears because she hated it. She asked, “Why did you let me do that?”

  In reality, she didn’t really want to have her hair cut off; she wanted something easy because she already had a baby at home and she thought it was a practical idea. But when she saw herself she felt fat, ugly, and naked because she’d cut off her hair. I didn’t ask enough questions, I just did what she wanted. But she was having a crap day and made an impulsive decision. She is still a client of mine and now we can laugh about that haircut. But I learned that the customer is not always right. At least not when it comes to hairdressing.

  When it comes to hairdressing, it is about transforming people inside and out so they like who they see in the mirror, even if they are getting the same cut and color they’ve had for years. And sometimes they want nothing more than to look the way they have always looked. Sometimes they just want to look and feel “normal.”

  Not long ago, a hospital near my salon called me and said they had treated a teenage girl who had just completed chemo and was going back to school and she wanted me to style her wig. She was a big fan of the show and wanted to look special for her prom and thought I was the hairdresser for the job. That is a lot of responsibility. She came in after hours so it could be private for her and we had a long talk about what she wanted in order to look “special.” She was sixteen, and of course her biggest concern was that she should look “normal.” She didn’t want to stand out, and although her classmates knew about her treatments, she wanted to fit in and feel pretty like her peers at the dance. I got a really high-quality wig for her and cut it on her head while she watched. I kept it simple and gave her long layers and a heavy fringe. Despite being really shy, she came alive as I cut the wig because she was transformed. And she was thrilled with the result because she said it made her feel beautiful. Her parents were also there and they were incredibly happy when they saw the finished cut. Her dad even cried. If I had given her what I might have defined as the “prom-night special,” it could have been a disaster. Sometimes, feeling normal does just the trick and that is okay, too.

  With experience, I’ve definitely honed my ability to listen and analyze clients’ comments. But it was my upbringing that taught me that everything is not as it seems. We have to delve beneath the surface to determine what—and who—is really there, and this pays dividends in a profession where we have the ability to make people feel incredibly great about themselves within a very short time. More than any other vocation I know, hairdressing is about instant gratification—if you have plastic surgery, it will take a while to heal and reveal the end result; if you have therapy, it will take a while to work out your problems and feel better about yourself. However, hairdressers can make you feel really good about yourself within an hour . . . or make you feel really shitty about yourself within an hour. And while the work is ephemeral, the feeling can last a long time. And it’s the feeling that keeps a client coming back.

  You can look in the mirror and say, “Oh my God, I love my hair,” and have a little spring in your step as you bounce out of the salon feeling fabulous and looking fabulous, or you can look in the mirror and say, “I hate my hair, I look horrible,” and slouch out of the salon feeling devastated for the next eight weeks. Let’s face it, everyone remembers a bad haircut. I don’t care who you are—whether it was Mom trimming your bangs, a stylist butchering your locks, or you having a drink, coloring your own hair, and making a right dog’s dinner out of it. All of us, women and men, have that story of the horrifying fuckup. And by the way, the fuckup is never just about the hair either. It’s about a feeling. And that’s why it is so important to feel good about yourself inside and out.

  The Five Things to Ask Yourself Before Opening a Business

  • “Is this truly what I want to do?” You will live your business for the first few years while you build it up and get it going. So you need to love what you do.

  • “Have I written a business plan?” Too many people jump in half-assed thinking they can make it up and problem-solve as they go along. This is how most businesses fail. You need to have a strong plan for success.

  • “Do I have the finances and resources to back it up?” Don’t spend your every last cent before you even open your doors. Say no to the extra fixtures or higher-priced paint and save for the rainy day that is around the corner. Unexpected expenses will come up and they will take you down if you don’t have a reserve to cover them.

  • “Do I have the skill to back it up?” I meet so many salon owners who not only don’t know about hairdressing, they don’t know how to balance a checkbook. There are lots of adult education classes that can teach you the 101s of business skills, and you should also know about the kind of business you are opening. If it’s a salon, you better know something about hair, and if it’s a bakery, you better know something about baking.

  • “Do I have the passion and commitment to back it up?” If you aren’t passionate about what you do, get out now. Period. Commitment is 90 percent of success. Wishy-washy doesn’t cut it.

  Chapter 10

  Going with Your Gut

  LITERALLY PUT, GUTS ARE your bowels, entrails, intestines. Not so pretty. But I have to say guts are good—and I don’t mean when served on a plate with salt and pepper. You often hear tough guys in the movies talk about relying on such gut instincts as courage and fortitude, and I take a lesson from them. I always regret not relying on mine, and as I get older, I trust those messy innards more and more. Trusting my gut has helped me to push myself and take chances. And trusting your gut may be the best inner beauty tip I can offer to any reader.

  When I was a young girl growing up in Adelaide, I dreamt of traveling the world. And globe-trotting was certainly part of the appeal of being a rock-star hairdresser. I moved to London at a young age and then leapt the pond to America when I was ready for a new adventure. But Ridgewood, New Jersey, is a pretty sedate town, so I jumped at the chance to be a platform artist and educator for Joico, a major international product company, because it meant traveling to a lot of other interesting places. I would go to far-flung cities I’d never been to before and teach local educators a new technique or how to work with a product that the company had just introduced. I would also participate in hair shows where I would style anywhere from ten to forty models. I started out working domestically for the company and got to see all the bits and pieces of America that I had missed. I went to places I wouldn’t have booked through my own travel agent, like Alabama and Tennessee and small cities across the Midwest.

  When I landed in Little Rock, Arkansas, the only thing I knew about the place was the song in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—you can take the girl out of the drag club, but you can’t take the drag club out of the girl. On the way to the hotel there was a giant billboard of Bill Clinton, who was president at the time, and someone had fired a hole in his face clean through with buckshot. Welcome to the president’s hometown.

  I will admit, I had a few things in common with Little Rock. It has lovely hot springs and plenty of bathhouses (I love a good bathhouse). And Al Capone, America’s most notorious mobster, used to vacation at the Arlington Hotel, where I was put up for the week. Apparently, he made Little Rock a gambling and prostitution mecca. And let’s face it, gangsters are familiar territory to me. Nonetheless, I was ready to get out of Dodge by the end of the week.

  Within two years, I was doing anywhere from six to twelve educational events a year in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Australasia, and the Far East. Eventually, I worked exclusively as an international artist, flying about 140,000 miles a year. I got to see the world and in time focused primarily on Asia and the Pacific R
im, which I loved partly because it is unlike anywhere else culturally, culinarily, and linguistically. While I learned just enough Vietnamese and Chinese to get by during my travels, being in these countries was definitely a foreign experience and that was both exciting and intimidating. I have more than a few war stories from my travels in which listening to my gut really helped get me out of a jam. A lot of the time I was by myself; there was no team. It was just me and the locals with whom I worked, and I had to follow my instincts if I wanted to do my job and stay safe.

  I traveled to Taipei one March to conduct a weeklong training program with local hairdressers at a mountain resort. As I soon found out, March is typhoon season in Taiwan, but I didn’t know that when I landed in the pouring rain. The drive up the mountain was very steep and my driver got lost. So what should have been an hour’s drive turned into three hours slowly navigating the mountainside roads in torrential downpour with the driver screaming into her cell phone in Chinese. She didn’t speak a word of English. We finally arrived at the hotel in the middle of the night and no one at the resort, which was in a rural area, spoke a word of English either. In fact, everything at the hotel was in Chinese and the rest of my group wasn’t due to arrive for another day, so I had no translator. I managed to check myself in but couldn’t get anything except Chinese-language programming on the TV. Even the room-service menu was in Chinese. I was up all night with jet lag watching the clock and soap operas I couldn’t understand, and when it was finally morning I went down to figure out breakfast. But for reasons that are still a mystery to me, the hotel staff wouldn’t let me into the restaurant—maybe because of what was to come. Oddly, I noticed that the glass windows on the front of the hotel were boarded up and the people in the lobby were thinning out. For a moment I considered following them to the exit, but where would I go? My driver was long gone and no one could understand me. It was pouring rain and I was in the middle of nowhere.

  Instead of leaving the hotel, I went back to my room and tried the phones, but they were out of order. I managed to use pigeon Chinese to order some rice and vegetables from room service, but the hotel staff was nowhere to be found. When I returned downstairs, the place was a ghost town and the rain and winds were horrendous. I could see mud running down the side of the mountain and I knew I was in for it. The storm was clearly getting worse and I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t communicate with anyone, couldn’t get any news, so I did the only thing I could think of—I curled up in bed and slept through it. Sometimes you have to weather the storm, literally.

  The next morning, I woke up and the rain had eased. I looked out and saw the carnage. Uprooted trees, mud slides, and sheer chaos. The hotel was trying to get back to business as usual and my translator finally managed to reach me on the phone. He told me there had been a typhoon and the entire area around Taipei had been in a state of emergency. I had essentially spent the night alone in a natural disaster zone and I didn’t even know it. I just followed my instincts and muddled through.

  My gut also came in handy when I did the first open exhibition hair show in Bangkok, Thailand. I had only done private shows in Bangkok up until that time and this was the first show where anyone from the public could buy a ticket, so it was a big deal. Not only did I do the hair for all twenty-five models, but because I was traveling solo, I made the decision to create the wardrobe myself, too. I knew the clothes had to be over-the-top; real in-your-face fantasy. During the last show I had done in Bangkok, the local stylist totally dropped the ball, failing to pull together any of the clothes that were needed. In the midst of that crisis, I wound up walking the streets at eleven o’clock at night with a pocketful of cash trying to purchase the clothes myself. None of the shops would work within my budget and I was ready to give up until I walked by a small boutique and saw a fabulous Thai gay boy through the window. On a hunch, I went in and told him my dilemma and he promised to find everything I wanted and get it to the hotel the next day. I was nervous but my gut said to trust him, so I gave him the money. The next day, the clothes arrived one hour before the girls had to go onstage and they were fabulous. My gut was right.

  So when my gut told me to do the wardrobe myself for this big public exhibition, I went with it. It was a sink-or-swim situation—either it would be totally amazing or it would be totally disastrous, in which case I’d have no one to blame but myself. I can’t really sew, so I drew on my experience backstage at the drag clubs for inspiration. I created tutus of varying styles: short ballet-type tutus, as well as tutus that were long in the back, short in the front and some that were covered in sequins and feathers. And it all really worked!

  I had just finished fitting the models with the clothes that I’d made and I needed to get shoes, accessories, and a few other little pieces to polish the look. I was walking down the street in broad daylight when two guys on a motorbike drove straight into me. They were trying to grab my bag, but they also had a hold of my dress. So when they gunned the bike they started to pull me with them. In a flash, I hauled on my dress to get it back, but they still managed to take the bag before peeling away. I was lucky they didn’t drag me halfway down the street. Only because I reacted so quickly did I save myself from being roadkill. But I was still bloodied up as I sat there on the curb. And I was broke, too. They had my money, my credit cards, my identification, my hotel key, and my cell phone.

  I walked back to the hotel and got my passport out of the room safe, and when I told the clerks what had happened, they insisted that I report the incident to the officials. I went to the police station but the officers there only spoke Thai and they told me I had to go to another police station. The next police station didn’t really want to help me either because the cops knew they weren’t going to catch the guys. While I sat waiting for the police to interview me, an old Thai lady was being interrogated for stealing a bottle of shampoo. The policeman was screaming at her while she was on her hands and knees kissing his feet and begging for forgiveness. Eventually, she was put in a cell, which I walked by as I went to give my statement. My account of events was written in Thai, so I have no idea what it said. It was a very intimidating setting and I felt quite powerless. I could have easily wound up in the cell next to that old lady being asked to buy my way out. Thankfully, I was smart enough to have the distributor’s interpreter meet me at the police station and so I was finally let go later that night. But I have often wondered what happened to that old lady in the cell next to me.

  The next morning, I was backstage putting on a hair show for a huge crowd, which came off without a hitch. Everyone talked about how fabulous the models looked and no one had any idea that I had spent the night at the police station sweating bullets before resuming my search for the perfect shoes.

  That wasn’t my only scary run-in with the authorities in another country. I was the first Westerner, and the first woman, to do a hair show in Vietnam. I believe it was in 2002 and I was really excited to go there, but I wasn’t sure what to expect because, after all, Vietnam was still a communist country and I was traveling alone to meet the team. I was told that if there was any problem at immigration I should make sure I had money for a bribe. So when I landed in Ho Chi Minh City and saw all the armed military at the airport, I was on edge. I didn’t really see any other Westerners when I got off the plane and it was chaos trying to figure out where and how to queue. I actually got through immigration without a problem despite having a fight with two Vietnamese girls who cut in front of me. Of course, I got my back up and told them to go to the end of the line and wait their turn. They started yelling at me in Vietnamese and I shouted back in English until I noticed all the armed guards around the room and thought better of drawing attention to myself. Sometimes, standing up for yourself in that kind of situation means shutting the hell up.

  Baggage claim consisted of a few guys throwing bags on a carousel and all over the floor once the carousel was full. The airport itself was pretty much a tin shed. I looked out and there was a sea of people on
the street screaming out names and holding up signs. It was crazy and exciting all at the same time. I found the one guy in the crowd who had my name on his sign and he drove me to my hotel. As we drove by an imposing building with a helicopter on the roof I asked the driver what it was and he explained that it was where the Americans had abandoned his people—aka the U.S. embassy. That was the last time I neglected to read the entire travel book on the plane before landing somewhere.

  Vietnam is amazing and like nowhere else I have ever been. There are people everywhere and more mopeds than cars. I would see four people and a chicken all balancing on one moped riding among oxen on the road. It was truly insane. To cross the street in Vietnam is to take your life in your hands. You have to have balls of steel. You have to learn to cross by just doing it; if you look at the chaos hurtling toward you, you’ll freeze and then you are fucked. It is the meanest version of that eighties videogame Frogger. And I loved it.

  I went to a salon to prep the models for the show, which was being held at the opera house that was built at the turn of the century by the French and is quite beautiful. Doing the show there was a big deal because the place is now a government building, so we had to get clearance in advance. Officials were scheduled to attend, and I was aware that if they didn’t like what they saw, we would be shut down in an instant. Needless to say, I had to make sure everything was really good.

  I started to prep the models with a team of local hairdressers. And I use the term “hairdresser” loosely because you don’t have to have a license in Vietnam to cut hair. I was meeting them for the first time and, of course, had to communicate through an interpreter, so I did all the haircuts myself. I directed the team to blow-dry and do some styling, but I was pretty much on my own to make fifteen models look fabulous in the first Western hair show to be staged in front of a host of Vietnamese government bigwigs. In a sense, I was representing the West and I didn’t want to fuck it up.