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The Beautician

Maybe I was too young to be a beauty school instructor…

I had gone to a very hip beauty school, I loved the whole experience. The building was a remodeled Masonic temple filled with delicious aroma's and very cool cosmetology instructors and students. I write this to say, just after going out into the real world of doing hair for three years, I came back to get a job as an instructor myself. The hiring process took the better part of a summer season. I had an over the phone interview and then I went in for a panel interview where I had to pretend to teach a class to some of my former instructors... gulp. But they did eventually offer me the job. After I had been working in that position for about 8 months I would watch the administration try and offer the same job to anyone with a cosmetology license... I don't know why they gave me such a production. But I took the job with excitement and dreams of furthering my career, although teaching beauty school is generally a step in the wrong direction. I was young and thought I was making moves.


I began instructing under some senior teacher's that have been at the school for a long time. I was placed in the intro class to get the idea of how to run a class. Things were going good and I was getting my barring's. One thing that I didn't even consider was that the fact that the majority of the students attending the school were close to my age. These weren't children that I was sharing my skills and knowledge with, these were my peers.


The school was broken up into 9 week segments. Every 9 weeks a new class would start and the other classes would change focus on what they were working on. So you could be focusing on hair cutting, then chemical's (color and texture services), and then skin and nails and so on. Every group had some stand out students for good or bad reasons. Sometimes it was a student that was amazing at doing hair and you just could tell they were going to be a success, sometimes it was a terrible attitude and sometimes there's a student that just can't get a break. Beauty school is a pressure cooker environment. It's timed, you have to have so many credit hours to be completed in a certain time frame. The course is generally a 9-5 Tuesday through Saturday type of commitment so that makes having a job outside of school very difficult if not impossible. That also means no money coming in. So you have young, poor, tired, students clinging to each other for sanity while they learn about the cosmetology industry. The students in the classes get really close while they are going through the program. There are a lot of life long best friends that met at beauty school.


I started to really get to know and like a lot of the students that were at the school too. They were so cool and fun. I started hanging out with a few choice students after work... their school day... we were all in our early 20's and anyone could show up at happy hour. Fraternization was frowned upon, especially the romantic type but having drinks at the same establishment couldn't be too bad. Being sneaky made it even more fun. We would behave like teacher and student during the school day and then laugh and confide in each other at night.


One hot summer night we had finished our Saturday at the school and were ready for the weekend. Another instructor and myself went out to grab drinks and dinner and we ran into two students who were doing the same. One drink turned into three and who knows if we ever even ordered food. One of the students was a fun young gay man who was living with a roommate that happened to be an exotic dancer, he asked us if we wanted to go meet up with her at her work... Rick's cabaret. We were all in.


When we walked in, it was still light out. There wasn't much going on at the club yet, we got to go behind the scenes to the dressing area and meet the girls. I remember one girl named "Summer" a tanned blond stunner dancing to 'Candlebox's' song 'Far behind' it really left an impression on me. Somewhere in the next hour, the opportunity to take extasy came up. This was a YOLO situation and in that moment I said YES. My co-worker opted out of the party at that point and right there at the table in a strip club, me and the two students ate our little pill's and started our adventure for the night.


We left the club to get provisions for the night ahead of us. We ran around the city and got lost in the fun of the high. Drinking, smoking, laughing and just staring into nothing for hours on end. Eventually we found ourselves at a little spot called 'Hidden Beach'. Like the name states, it's a small secluded beach on the lake known for skinny dipping. The three of us stripped down and ran into the water as fast as we could. It felt amazing, stoned out of our minds in that cool water on a hot summer night. We finally climbed out of the lake and got dressed, there was a small group of people sitting around a small campfire and we joined them to warm back up. One of the people around the fire suddenly said "I think I saw you at the hair school when I was getting my hair done." Talk about a buzz kill, all of the sudden I had to straighten up and behave somewhat professional. I did not see that coming! I laughed at the situation and said "Yeah, that's me."


We shut it down after that, the student's dropped me off at my apartment and I fell into my bed to crash. The next time I saw them at the school I had to ask about my watch that I had left in their car. The next month I made the decision to leave the school, the entire state actually. I was too young to be teaching hair, I needed to be back behind the chair acting like the wild hairdresser that I am. I had a lot of wild nights that year of being a very young beauty school instructor but that night always stands out.



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