Blogger

Yesterday I took a short break while my client's perm was neutralizing. The ladies in the break room were discussing tips, and how cheap some people are. For example, there's this mother-daughter team that comes in for full highlights/lowlights, spends $175 and then tips the girls doing their hair $3 each. (Not unlike those ad clients who insist on the least expensive commercial shoot possible, but mandate that it happen in LA -- with no craft service and a cheap hotel for the agency. You have to explain that a shoot in LA is UNION and that craft service is required by law. Jeesh. Anyway, back to the tips...) I shared the story of the lady who laid out her dollar's worth of change in a row on my station, and how I surreptitiously took a picture of her doing it. (see my post from July 7th, "Tips Again.")

A new girl, whom I had yet to meet, said "Oh, you're the Blogger!"

I would have thought I'd freak out that someone at school knew about this blog. But really I was pretty flattered. Especially when she said she really likes it and thinks it's funny.

Still, I was pretty surprised that someone just "found" it. So I asked -- How did you find it?"

"I do a lot of research. I found it when I was looking at this school."

Two or three people around us asked "what blog, what?" I just answered "I haven't posted in a really, really long time." Since everyone at school talks over each other and has the attention span of a flea, they were all on to the next thing before my secret was out. That's a lot like advertising too. Maybe it has to do with being creative. A lot of creative people together -- they're loud, talk over each other and jump from thing to thing. I always thought that that conversational style was a New York thing. Now I think it has to do with being creative. But I digress once again.

So I told the new girl "Don't tell anyone. I really don't want anyone at school to know about it. I joke around that I'm writing a book that'll be made into a screen play and Tyler Perry will play Rhonda; but everyone thinks its a joke. It sort of is, it's sort of not."

How Starbucks Saved My Life, the book that inspired this crazy journey of mine, is being made into a movie starring Tom Hanks. So you never know.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Yesterday I had a client with really thick, luxurious beautiful hair that hung just below her shoulders. Her hair was definitely her best feature. She came in saying she wanted "a wedge, but didn't want to loose a lot of the length." Now a "wedge," is the Dorothy Hamill cut from the '70's. (The client is 61 years old.) So the consultation took some time during which I began to understand the look she was going for and suggested a long layered cut. But she insisted that she wanted the back graduated, so we finally agreed to a long (just above shoulder length) inverted bob. I parted her off and started cutting the back. She said "You're not cutting off ten inches back there are you?" I showed her how much 3 inches is on the comb (there are numbered notches); then held the hair up in the mirror to show her where I was cutting. She said "Oh good, cause I don't want too much off." Her very dense hair took about twenty five minutes to cut, during which time she kept grabbing combs off my station and parting off and combing her hair. I had to keep telling her that I knew how to part hair and that if she wanted the cut to come out right she had to stop playing with her hair while I was working. I then gave her a fabulous (if I do say so myself) blow-out. Other students, and two instructors, commented on how great it looked. When I was done she said "Oh this is much too long. The kids will say it's not different at all." Since we had had only FOUR clients the entire day and I was extremely bored, I agreed to cut it again. So I took off another two and a half inches. Then she wanted the it set on hot rollers. So we did that too. Even though she didn't pay for it. When we finally finished she said she loved the cut but would come back in two weeks cause she wanted to do something so the curl would hold. I told her that they way to get that would be with a long layered cut! Then we had a 15 minute discussion/consultation about her color.

So many things in this experience were just like advertising clients. Getting crap for free, trying to do it them selves, dictating a process that can never result in the product they want. Jeshshshsh.

When I worked on Borden. We did a year's worth of research to develop a new ad platform for Sweetened Condensed Milk. In almost every focus group we'd have some woman weeping as she remembered her grandmother's pie or uncle's home-made strawberry ice cream. Simply seeing the package could make their eyes start to fill up. And not just one or two times. This happened in almost every group. Advertising gold! Now all we had to do was take all that emotional intensity and package it in a :30 spot. The Creative Team did a masterful job. The storyboards tested well and we where sure people would be making twice the amount of fudge and double the pies they had made in pervious holiday seasons. But WAIT! Right before

production was to begin the Client mandated that we revise the spots to :15's. We spent weeks trying to create :15's with the emotional impact of the :30's. It just wasn't going to happen. We explained the nature of theatre -- and how to have intense emotion you need tension. And tension has to build, and that takes TIME. Client still wanted to "make it like the Hallmark spots." They couldn't believe that what Hallmark does in a :60 or :90 can't be done in :15. Of course we ended up with :15 vignettes that did little more than list the product attributes among a somewhat warm family feeling. No tears among our viewers. And no big bump in business.

You just can't win. If you can, let me know how.

Resume Gold?

I read a little article on Talent Zoo about age-proofing your resume. Apparently this is important for 20-somethings and people over 45. The author suggested leaving off the dates. Does this really work? If I got a resume without dates on it I'd be suspicious right away. "What's this guy hiding? Prison?" I think it's pretty easy to tell from a resume if someone is young and inexperienced. And when hiring for a junior position one doesn't expect a lot of experience. According to the article, the ideal amount of experience is 12 years. Anything older than 15, as well as graduation dates, should be eliminated. My first thought is that for me this would be kind of tragic since the first 12 years of my career were spent on Cheesebrough-Pond's and Procter & Gamble. Resume gold. But I do realize that the gold has now turned to lead and should probably be jettisoned. On the plus side, I do look a hell of a lot younger than I am. People are always shocked at my age. Usually the cashier's at Aldi and the girls at school. "Why Miss Cynthia, you older than my mother. I never would have thought that. For real?"

TV is free

It's true. TV does come through the air, and it's free! Isn't that so much more twenty-first century than having it come through cable and costing $100+/month? With the exceptions of Dexter, Man Men and Being Human it's all as it was prior to the disconnection. Thanks to the gifts of three converter boxes, our old TiVo and Comedy Central on line. We should have done this years ago.

Upside Down

We learned last week that we're now upside down in our mortgage. Reason being that TWO years ago, Hamilton County readjusted our property taxes based on the purchase price of the house in 2006 -- AND THEY NEVER TOLD US. For the past TWO years, Chase (the holder of our mortgage) was taking the extra funds needed to meet the new tax base out of our escrow account. Neither Hamilton County nor Chase ever notified us. Seems to me like this kind of thing should be illegal. Now that the escrow account has been COMPLETELY depleted, our monthly mortage payment has risen $302. We can appeal this assessment; but only between January 1 and March 31st. Long story short, we're screwed. $302 may not sound like a lot when you're making big advertising money, but it's a tremendous amount when you've been unemployed for a year and a half -- and are looking at making very little money for quite a long time to come.

So we're getting rid of cable TV, the land-line, the newspapers, all subscriptions, the Y membership. All along I've been thinking it's some kind of miracle we've done as well as we have since I lost my job. Just by giving up vacations, restaurants, entertaining, retirement contributions, and college fund contributions we were able to get along pretty much as before. And really I've hardly "felt" it -- what with being at school 40 - 50 hours a week, JJ's new school/football, volunteering and church stuff, my life is fuller than it's ever been. But the pinch has come.

Soul Food

As you know, I'm learning about a lot more than just hair, skin and nails at the Western Hills School of Beauty and Hair Design. One of the other things I've been learning is how to cook soul food. I've adopted Ms. Kathy's Corn Pudding recipe and have made it for many a BBQ this Summer. Everyone LOVES it and it is super easy:

Preheat oven to 350°

Mix together:

1 can corn

1 can creamed corn

1 stick of butter melted

1/2 to 1 cup of sour cream

1 package Jiffy Corn Bread Mix

Pour into a medium size casserole dish and bake for 50 to 60 minutes. It's slappin'!

Also try Ms. Margaret's Greens. This recipe takes a very long time, as the greens need to simmer for at least four hours. But if you're a white girl like me, who always loved greens but had no idea

how to make them, this recipe is also very easy.

Use a big, high-quality stew pot.

Cover two smoked turkey wings with water, bring to boil and then simmer until the meat falls off the bones. About two hours. Strain out bones return liquid and meat to pot.

Rinse four to six bunches of collard greens. (I bought too much

thinking it would shrink down like spinach. It shrinks, but a lot less then spinach would.)

Chop the greens by slicing every 1/2" or so. Discard the very bottoms and very tops of the bunches.

Put the greens in the pot with the smoked turkey and simmer for four hours.

Add salt and pepper to taste -- and hot sauce/hot pepper if you like it. Delicious!

Language

Three weeks before Christmas in 1992 my boss came into my office and asked "Do you have a valid passport? They want you to go to Mexico City to lead the Hasbro pitch." Well of course I had the passport, but my retention of high school Spanish amounted to "Mas cerveza por favor." An intensive Berlitz program for relocating executives and eleven months of working in a bi-lingual office fixed that. Buy the time I returned to New York the following October, my Spanish language skills resembled those of a precocious Mexican three- year-old. I had begun to stop translating in my head. I just sort of felt the words wash over me. I'd understand the jist of what was being said and would respond without knowing exactly what I was saying either. But it worked.

I've been in beauty school now for eleven months. About the same amount of time that I had been living in Mexico when I stopped translating in my head. I can now end a sentence in a preposition, truncate my sentences, and use ghetto slang with aplomb. I still struggle with the double negative. No sure I'll ever be able to adopt that one. Whenever I use these new language skills I'm surprised when no one calls me out on it. Some times I find myself actually thinking in this new (to me) colloquial grammar. Kind of like when I was immersed in the Spanish language.

I have an octogenarian client who use to be a Dean at UC. I gave her Newsweek to read under the dryer and told her I thought she'd enjoy the article on Mark Twain, "the release of his memoir, 100 years after his death was the impetus for the article." I thought to myself "I just said 'impetus!' then I looked around to see if anyone heard me.

I need to spend some more time with my own demographic.