Beauty School
Entering QBC, Quality Beauty College, at age 56, my schoolmates comprised entirely of two dozen or so high school girls and two boys who were given the choice of how to serve detention: ‘trade school hours…..or detention’. Imagine the enthusiasm these youths have for the subject of learning to provide personal services to the general public. The instructors are Miss Jo, rough-mannered, late middle-aged, portly, likeable… and Miss Deb, the Dark Karen, tall, slim, black hair, blue eyes, a mix of cold Queen-Bee and dashing Fashion Barbie. Both women have honed marvelous skills being prison guards.
Miss Jo: “Listen up ladies . . and gents….cell phones are not allowed on the floor. You have lockers, that is home base for your phones. Anyone caught with a cell phone on the floor will be given dispensary detail disinfecting towels, foot baths, implements and tools, for the entire week, and I know how you all will not love that.”
The students in their black stylist capes slouch in the hydraulic chair stations, not looking at Miss Jo, but fiddling with their hair in the mirrors they face, or shooting knowing or withering looks at their inmates.
Miss Deb: “What Miss Jo says goes, girls and boys. This is a learning facility and you will be issued textbooks and workbooks, manikins, combs, brushes, perm rods, rollers and cutting tools, as well the gift of hands-on education about hair, skin and nails…..”
Lindsay: surly and coquettish at the same time, spike bleach-tiped, black lipsticked, holes in the knees of her jeans, mutters: “I’d like to nail file my way outta here.” She chuffs and snorts.
Lindsay’s station-mate, Meghan: “Big fatty chance about that.” Meghan’s heft of character leaves contrails of apprehension behind whatever she says and does. Even the tone of her voice, the deep pitch of it…her face a black and yellow ‘Yield’ sign….I’m afraid of Meghan.
Miss Deb continues: “QBC stands for Quality Beauty College and requires respect given to your instructors. We all know why most of you are here, so keep in mind this phrase: ‘consequences follow consequences.’ As your instructors, we want to afford you the chance to change direction in your educational life. Our intention is to help you do that. This vocation is a way you can earn a living and be independent without academia, if that is your persuasion and potential. This can be a very fun career.”
We are all given a starter kit and we write our names on the items and set up our rollabout carts. Already there is a hierarchy among the black capes, they’re like a murder of crows, complete with pecking order body language and facial clues as to which ones will be the biggest handful, who is to be the alpha of the flock.
Lindsay says to me, “Better lock up everything you own, even your water bottle or it will be taken. The wardens lock up everything, so if you need a supply you have to go find an instructor and they are usually out smoking.” I choose not to believe her. About the smoking, figuring it was really projection talk.
Meghan slides in her advice: “Yeah, and they both will rip the niceness right off you — and you’ve got a helluva lot of niceness to rip, girl.” She’s waggling her head, making the long blonde ponytail swish like a beautiful horse tail. She’s a living dichotomy.
I don’t like Meghan’s manner or personality, even though she may have just said I’m nice.
Lindsay: gives Meghan a shove. “Words of wisdom from our very own Cinderfuckingrella.” They look at each other in their private cackle contest until Miss Deb shoots them the ‘watch it!’ face.
I go to my car to eat my peanut butter sandwich at lunch hour, something that doesn’t need refrigeration because I can’t stand entering the pig sty lunchroom that’s a gross Troll Trough. Were I to have pointed that fact out to them, I’d be name-called ‘granny,’ and who needs that.
Within the first week of class, a half-dozen cell phones of violators get confiscated and pairs of troublemakers get separated. Three weeks are spent in the ‘study room,’ where I appear to be one of the few paying attention, asking questions or reading the material.
Before long we get released into the wild of practicing on each other, having used up the issued manikins’ hair that left them bald and ugly. Some girls markered up their manikin faces with goth-like make-up and questionable things sneakily tattooed on manikins not their own. Soon after that the real fun of revenge and/or jealousy haircutting on each other begins.
Student Kristen: “Miss Jo! Just because I couldn’t see the back of my head, Meghan did THIS!!!”. She turns her back to the class of supremely-interested peers, revealing a wickedly ragged chop-cut not in the manual or anywhere else. Her light brown hair being straight reveals the carnage; if it were to be extra curly and red like mine, mistakes would never even be seen.
Meghan: “I was trying to match the picture!” She holds up a page from a hairstyle magazine that shows a gorgeous model with a ten-star advanced A-line haircut. But we all know the animosity between Kristen and Meghan, so there’s that.
Of course I am there to learn stylist skills that will be needed when other jobs fold up in our ever-increasingly automated society. Hair doesn’t become obsolete until illness, or until old age takes the last silver threads away, but until then……
My first clipper cut has me terrified of the power tool with the slicing razor blades. I’m to hold it against this unassuming man’s head with steady hands and confidence. Even at my age and having been an executive secretary to Corporate Vice Presidents, I am suddenly a child afraid of doing something all by myself. I think of the movie, ‘There Will Be Blood.’
Miss Jo has respect for me being a mature adult who doesn’t smack gum, sneak food onto the floor, smoke around the corner outside, or insult customers who risk their appearance in the hands of teenaged attitudes that don’t care about others, or finishing the course or getting a license. She professionally places her hand over mine as we glide the #1 guard together up the side of his head. He looks in the mirror at us with a patient and kind expression.
When left to take a sweep on my own, the sheep-sheared patch I leave behind doesn’t match hers at all….it is nearly to the skin. I try to keep my face from revealing the ‘Oh No!’ I feel is flooding my eyes, recalling Miss Deb saying, “…always remember, clients can see our faces even though we are looking at the back of their heads, so fix your face when making a mistake. But Miss Jo shows me how to ‘blend’ the scalp-patch into the rest of the cut, with the client walking away a little bit happy.
In the deep of winter:
Miss Deb: “I know it’s cold outside but it’s 7:00 — class time, so get out from under the hairdryers and punch the clock girls.”
Lots of whining, “Oh, Miss Deb, my hands are freezing, I can’t work with them yet.” And, “Sorry, never heard you, the dryer was too loud!” or “Just five more minutes???”
They meander to the time-punch on the wall, gossiping, talking back to the instructors under their breathy breaths, some breaking into cheerleading moves to see who is the most flexible, others just flouncing around as if grounded from going to the prom.
Weeks and months unfold, along with our skills with chemical perms that smell like rotten eggs on fire, with hair colors that produce a horrid burnt orange, sickly greens and gun-metal grays, with manicures that require the use of the ‘blood spill kits’, with fights over who gets the short straw for the dreaded pedicures. The losers usually give their short straw to me because I don’t mind the foot baths. The most fun for the students is in the wax room. My least favorite section because there’s no fixing mistakes. Like this one:
Chevy, the sophomoric serious one of the boys, emerges from the wax room, lifts the back of his shirt right there in Miss Deb’s face, brandishing a scarlet patch of skin surrounded by fine dark hair. “What should I do, it is on fire!” His voice, in transition from changing, squeaks out the fire! part.
Our flamboyant student, Sayha, is in love with himself. He has beautiful-boy facial features, wide-set ebony eyes, sweeping lashes and loves the waxing phase of study and practice. He isn’t hairy enough for the girls to practice on him, so today he performs brow waxing on Kristen, the two of them thick and thieves (I mean as) thieves. From my station next to the dispensary, I can hear Kristen shrieking as she propels herself out of the wax room yelling for Miss Jo; and from the ten-siren sound of it, I figure someone is either scalped, lacerated, burned or stabbed.
Kristen: “Oh my GOD, Miss Jo!! Look what Sayha did to my eyebrow!!!
Miss Jo calmly closes in on the freaked-out teenager and examines the brow. “Oh, that is pretty bad.”
Kristen: “No! Not that one, the OTHER one!”
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January 19, 2025 ~~ djl. — Bless their juvenile hearts, and I hope they grew up to be respectful adults who are happy with their life journey. They surely gave me stories to tell!
