Alma's Healthy Hair Clinic

     Page One Hundred-Nineteen.
     Sometimes I stray from the primary topics of this blog: cooking, feeding children, nannying and being a male nanny. Today I'm going to stray very far. However, This is such an enormous topic that I'll choose to not write too much about it as it's a lot.
     I've mentioned that I have a part time job managing a beauty salon. Well, it's an interesting situation for a variety of reasons. It's actually a twenty-five year old salon that only recently changed locations. It had been In East Cleveland, a neighboring suburb, since opening it's doors in the late '80's, but just moved here to Cleveland Heights in February of 2013. That's when I started as manager.
     The owner is a lovely woman, Alma, whom I worked with in 1986. I only kept that particular job for a minute, but it was long enough for Alma and me to become friends; we would subsequently stay in touch through the decades. Alma is an extremely fine hairdresser and would eventually get her B.A. in education then her M.B.A. A few years ago a national technical college hired her to establish a new cosmetology program on their national campuses. Today, that's her day job, but she still owns and operates the salon, doing hair in the evenings and on Saturdays.
     I have a good reputation as a hairdresser, reaching fairly high status in the 1980's when I really cared a lot about it. I mostly stopped working in salons in the '80's when I went back to college. I've worked in salons occasionally since then, but primarily I've been a freelance hairdresser since '86, doing clients' hair in their homes. Alma has long been the president of my fan club. I was her hairdresser for a number of years, coming into her salon, and cutting her hair with a salon full of clients watching the process. She also encouraged me to get a cosmetology instructors license so I could eventually teach.
     Alma is black and her salon was named one of the one hundred best black beauty salons in the world by Essence magazine in the mid-'90's. I was the only white person in my beauty school so I'm comfortable with black hair and a predominately black environment though I've rarely had African-American clients during my career. I'm just somebody who's okay with most people regardless of their age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, income, nationality, physical or cognitive infirmity, religion or class. Alma knows that. So when she moved her expensive, African-American beauty salon and wanted a manager without an ulterior motive, she phoned me: a very white, Jewish fellow. I do very little hair in the salon, I'm the manager. But I'm considering expanding my role in that area. We'll see.
     In the meantime, the salon has some issues. We're trying to rebuild after loosing a large number of clients in the move; Alma, who's half Puerto Rican wants to expand into the Hispanic market even though there are few Hispanics in this part of town; we need hairdressers who will actually be here when they say they're going to be and other issues too numerous to mention. I know the beauty industry extremely well, having begun beauty school in 1978 and having been licensed since '81. It takes a lot to surprise or shock me and I think much of what I see at the salon is normal. But sometimes I just feel like walking around and saying, "can't we all just get along?"