Story time……..If you haven’t read my last post: Dear Katie Holmes, please do. It leads to why Jamie, who this story is about, found her way to my chair.

I receive a call from a new client, Jamie about releasing herself from the confines of her hair. A lot of hair. She wants to chop it off after finding inspiration on Brigknowsbest.com from my Dear Katie Holmes letter. Zoom ahead to her Friday evening appointment. She arrives and is so cute. I can’t wait to create a new look for her. We have a ten minute conversation about what she would like and I think will be best considering her hair type, face shape, height & her time available to style each day. She is a first time mom of a 4 month old, so the answer to the latter is that a cut that can air dry would be brilliant.  We realize she will cut enough to donate to Locks of Love so prior to shampooing her hair, her length is put into a few ponytails, cut off and handed to her in a ziploc bag. Now if you haven’t ever experienced this type of dry cut let me tell you, it leads to very uneven results that are righted in the cut following the shampoo. I even joke with her and tell her “I’m finished.” We laugh and head to the shampoo bowl. Now comes the fun part of the story. Not a second after she lies back, the power goes out.  It is pitch black with about 10 people at play hair lounge. I have never experienced darkness like this since inhabiting the space 2 ½ years ago. Uh oh! I am sure it will kick right back on…. no luck. Our emergency flashlights were hardly ready for what was too come…. Jamie’s haircut, ½ a haircut on another new client and a head of highlights that was 25% complete on a different new client. Imagine, not only are you nervous your first time in a salon, think about if it was dark and you had to thoroughly trust the innate skills of your stylist. Some of the others in the building were stylists finishing their clients. The clients were rung up and left, and the stylists picked up any light possible to assist with the tasks at hand. Needless to say, Jamie really experienced our shampoo lounge as I shampooed her in near darkness. She was such a good sport. She told me she trusted me and to “do my thing.” Okay, she believes in me, I believe in me and I can’t send her home mid cut. Lets do this. The interesting thing for me was how much of this particular cut was by feel. The lights stayed out for an entire hour. The winds were so bad in Simi Valley that night that a major power source was knocked out and ½ of the city was in darkness. Of course the second I finished the last snip the power was back on. I was happy to check over Jamie’s cut, not bad, really good. A few adjustments and her approval. She loved it! Success! I didn’t charge her. How could I? She was so terrific about the entire situation. I just refer to it as the no-light special. Jamie, you ROCK!! You are adventurous, fearless and have a wonderful spirit. Thank you.                  Note to the next power outage: play hair lounge now has lantern stye lights ready for you………..

P.S. Check back next week when I confront Christina Aguilera about her current hair situation.

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