Learning life's lessons - at the hairdressers

By Connie Liu

Life for Yalies changes quickly. Every year, we see new faces, learn new names, and say goodbye to old friends. It is only four short years before we're kicked out into the cold wide world.

During my first two years here I became absorbed in these immediate changes without realizing it, and forgot about the world outside of Yale and everything beyond the present. Change had become such a normal part of my life that I rarely noticed it any more.

And because such change is inevitable, I philosophized, my loyalty to things like coffee shops, cereal brands and hair salons could change at a moment's notice. As long as the coffee was strong, the cereal had marshmallows in it, and the hairdresser got the hair out of my eyes, it didn't matter whether I went to the Daily Caffe or XandO's, or shopped at Wawa's or Store 24.

Or so I thought. It never occurred to me that I would develop such a strong loyalty to a hairdresser at The Workshop, a small hair salon on Chapel Street. It began in February of my freshman year when I asked my roommate to trim my bangs and instead she cut half of them off. A desperate phone call later, I found myself in the capable hands of Vera, a motherly Italian woman who smelled a little like cigarettes. She salvaged my butchered bangs, but that's not why I went back to her.

I think I kept returning to her because she had a scarf of mine. She declared that she was psychic and told me to give her my scarf so she could divine my fortune from it. I did so to humor her. Every time I went to The Workshop I would ask for it, but inevitably she would say she had forgotten it at home. I never did learn my fortune.

But perhaps the reason ran deeper. She reminded me of another world out there and of a Yale and New Haven that changed as the world around it changed. She would glance out the window, observing the passersby, commenting that Chapel Street was once so different. She said that Yale was completely different in the '60s and '70s: hippies, drugs, protests--"a wild time," she said. The restaurant owners, shopkeepers, and businessmen on Chapel would watch out for each other. Today, New Haven is more sedate, but, she said, they all still look out for each other.

I told her in April of this year that I planned on staying in New Haven for the summer, living in the Cambridge Arms . She warned me to be careful and then chuckled, "Tell your mother not to worry about you, your hairdresser is worried enough." At that point, I felt like I was part of a community beyond Pierson College and Yale University--because Vera was looking out for me. On that personal level, I became connected to a larger world and to a formerly distant history that I had never noticed before.

But for whatever reason it was that I had cut my hair for two years by this woman, the end of my relationship with her came last May, when Vera called and left a message with my roommate. She had quit working at The Workshop and left her new number, but I didn't write it down in the end-of-the-year chaos of finals and packing.

This turn of events explains why I found myself in a different barber chair, in the capable hands of a woman whose name (I think) was Helen. She took one look at my hair, began to cluck, and motioned another hairdresser to see the sad sight before her.

"Look Emilio, all uneven!" she cried, cupping the fringes of my wet hair. "This will not do." "Who did your hair?" Emilio asked me.

I shrugged my shoulders and mumbled that I didn't remember, that I'd forgotten. "Yeah, well, that's the right idea," he said with a snort. "Just forget about 'em!" he yelled, and having passed judgement, he simply walked away carelessly.

Yet forgetting Vera is an impossible thing to do, though. In exchange for my scarf, Vera gave me a connection to a world outside Yale, even if it was just down Chapel Street.

Connie Liu is a junior in Pierson.

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