Good By ‘08 2 of 3
Good By ‘08 2 of 3
part 2 a
I don’t know how many times I have landed in the Las Vegas Airport. I usually can even tell you what terminal we will land in and what baggage carousel we will be at. But this time it was different. Every person I saw I could swear was a hairdresser. I swear I made it through Concourse C, with out ever touching the floor, just floated the whole way.
Tuesday our daughter likes to think of herself as a personal assistant (only when it is Convient to herJ) she had the entire night planned complete with the town car ride from the airport right down to the dinner reservations. So we get to the Mandalay Bay and check in. Get up to our room and I want to go shopping. Ok, I love shopping, women’s hand bags, and ball gowns; I guess I am a closet Hetero. Anyhow Tuesday starts laying in to me about changing her plans and we need to go to dinner because we have reservations. Well we start walking to the little Mexican restaurant in the Mandalay Ballroom just beyond China Grill. We get to the Starbucks at the end of the hall and there it is. A poster about 4 feet wide by 20 feet tall of our work, at first I couldn’t believe it. I had to turn around and ask DeAnn if she saw it and she was already crying. My god how surreal, I remember just getting into this business and just wanting a poster of my work put out by Paul Mitchell. Now I have this huge poster in the Atrium of the Mandalay Bay for everyone to see.
Sunday Morning- (get together)
Woke up quick at around 9:45. New I had to be in Vegas soon. Whatever, we catch a mediocre breakfast at the House of Blues. The whole time people were calling us trying to figure out what were doing that afternoon so we could get together. However I found out that my cell was dead and I packed two of DeAnnalyn’s cell chargers, what a pain in the A$@.
Before we left Portland Kelly set up a meeting with the owner of a hair care manufacture at 1:00 at the Hard rock. So we went and met up with Patrick, while we took a chance and let Tuesday go to the pool by herself (How Scary). D and could not get our mind off the fact that tomorrow was the awards ceremony and Tuesday was by herself at the pool. I am glad we didn’t sign anything we probably would have committed to anything. Not that that product line was bad but we could have committed to washing Patrick’s car or something.
Anyhow we meet up with Denise around 7:00 and head up to the cocktail party. I noticed right away that there were only a few Hair Dressers. Most everybody in the crowd was Manufactures, Distributors and so on. I don’t do well in that environment, I get intimidated so I just latch on to the people I recognize, my group of friends. Well we are standing on the wall trying to blend in when two of my students show up with our photographer BABAK. I explain to him my terrified situation about parties and business people. So he runs of and grabs one of his buddies to introduce him to us.
His buddy happened to be Robert Lobetta. Oh SH*& Robert Lobetta. There are a few people that I feel are responsible for what hairdressing is today some of those people are Vidal Sassoon, Trevor Sorbie, and Robert Lobetta. I look at him as a true artist and would consider him the Salvador Dali of my industry, and here he is. Just shooting the Sh%&. We are taking about the industry, and about art, and so on when I bring up how nervous I am about the show.
That was when the whole conversation took an odd twist. He started telling me about how he hated competing and about what it was like when he won Advant Garde Stylist of the year at the British Hairstyling Awards and how he never wanted to compete again. He goes on to tell me “You know Ryan.. I have judged a lot of these Hairdresser Awards, and what I have found is…”
To Be Continued.