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  Mum and I in New Orleans.

  Me with my brother Gary and his wife, Viv, closer to home.

  All the siblings together, including my brother Geoffrey on the far right, flaunting our birthdates.

  With my brother Greig in Greece.

  On a recent return trip to Australia I visited the first salon I worked at, formerly called The Stud Bar.

  On that same trip I visited with Lea Pratt, one of the coolest bosses I’ve ever had.

  I wish I could include a photo of one of the many trannies from my parents’ clubs who made my childhood so memorable, but the only images I saved are the ones in my head . . . and anyway, it’s not my place to out them.

  SUMMING UP THE COMPETITION

  I’m definitely an Aussie girl as you can tell by these pictures of me with kangas and a koala.

  But I am also a citizen of the world, participating in six to twelve international hair shows a year!

  Mine has been a life of room service, sightseeing, and hard work with people from all different cultures! Here I am in Hong Kong.

  Here I am in Greece.

  Here I am in Singapore.

  This is me at a platform show in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where I demonstrated the techniques of a precision cut for the audience.

  And at a similar show in Singapore.

  On this trip to Bangkok, I was keeping a stiff upper lip after having been mugged on the street the night before. Can you see the stitches? Thankfully the hair design speaks for itself!

  Achieving success is bloody hard work.

  But I love it just the same.

  The height of the experience is bringing out each person’s unique beauty.

  This business can bring out the best in all of us. . . .

  And really celebrate the fact that we each have our own style.

  Dating Yourself

  • I am a terrific date and a horrible date. I am surly as hell in the morning and really quite accommodating when it comes to deciding how to spend the evening. I know that because I have dated myself. I took the time to get to know me for myself and not as someone else’s girlfriend. Let’s face it, we all change who we are for the person we are dating. And we can be different versions of ourselves depending on the relationship that we are in. But when it’s just me, myself, and I, there is no one to hide behind or adapt to. And you start to figure out your own shit. I have a lot of friends who won’t eat at a restaurant alone or go to a movie by themselves. They think they’ll look like a “loser.” But I highly recommend it. Take yourself to dinner, enjoy your own company, and make your own decisions. Tune out everyone else and actually listen to yourself. You might like what you find and discover some things that you didn’t know you liked. Just don’t start talking to yourself. That would be weird.

  Chapter 6

  Idol Dreams

  I’VE ALWAYS BEEN AN incredibly hard worker, ever since landing my first paying job at my parents’ strip club when I was eight years old. Since Mum and Dad had no problem allowing me to hang out with my aunties at Jeremiah’s, it was hardly a stretch for me to work the stage lights one night when the light operator who normally did it called in sick at the last minute. The light operator’s job was to run all the lighting and music cues, operate the spotlight, and open and close the curtain. He also announced the strippers as they came on to perform their acts, but Mum and Dad drew the line at a kid doing that job, so my father announced the girls that night. The lighting box was my favorite place to watch the shows. It was exciting to see all the strobes and flashing colors and I knew all of the performers’ music and cues. So Dad handed me the gig . . . and quickly regretted it.

  As one of the transvestite strippers went into her act, the tape concealing her tackle snapped and everything was in danger of tumbling out. Without any extra tape to fix the problem, she just wanted to get through her number, so she briefly rushed offstage and used the club’s intercom system to tell me to dim the lights and keep the spot on her upper torso. That’s precisely what I did, and as soon as she’d finished, my father blew the shit out of me, screaming, “Why the hell did you make the stage so dark? No one could see a bloody thing!” He was concerned that the patrons would be disappointed with a strip show where nothing much was revealed. But the stripper came back on the intercom to tell me that I’d saved her life. All the rest of the strippers said I was great, too, because I got really into the drama of the show and knew just when to bring the lights up and down and when to cue the music. But my father was not a fan and the light operator soon returned to his job.

  Despite my career as a spotlight op being brief at best, it set me thinking about what I might do when I was older and I could get paid. From the time I was a little girl, I went with my Mum every week to get her hair done. And I loved the salon. I loved the smell, I loved the atmosphere, and I loved watching the hairdressers work their magic to transform people. The flaming queen who did my mother’s hair was totally over-the-top—even to a kid who was raised in a tranny strip club. I never knew who he was going to be from week to week when I went to the salon. He was a rock star—his clients thought he was a rock star; the stylists who worked with him in the salon treated him like a rock star; and he acted like a rock star. One time he turned his head into a tennis ball, cropping and dyeing his hair lime green, and then shaving rivets into it like the white seams on an actual tennis ball. Another time he wore these crazy tartan pants and a huge tartan poofy-sleeved cape with a high collar. He was a supertheatrical diva and I thought he was fabulous. I wanted to grow up to be just like him—to be a rock star who did hair, too. So from the time I was fourteen years old, my mind was set. I would be a hairdresser.

  Since I was too young to start any formal training, Mum walked into the Stud Bar, a salon in Surfers Paradise, where we were living, and offered me up as a free assistant so I could get experience. There, I got lots of practice shampooing, taking out rollers, serving clients tea and coffee, and generally doing all of the grunt work. This included getting down on my hands and knees to scrub the salon’s tiled floor with a toothbrush, which today might be perceived as indentured labor, but back then it taught me a lot of things, including humility and respect—traits that can be sorely lacking in today’s young hairdressers. My goal, of course, was to do people’s hair, not to get down on my hands and knees like Sadie the cleaning lady. But I never lost sight of what I wanted. So it didn’t matter if they were giving me the shit work and not paying me. I could already picture myself behind the chair as a hairdresser, doing rock-star hair. And I would have done anything to work toward that goal.

  Located in the Lido Arcade, the Stud Bar was a very small, well-established salon run by two women, and because Surfers Paradise is a tourist area, many of their customers were vacationers. The result was a mixed clientele, with plenty of men’s haircuts as well as a fair number of shampoos-and-sets and weekly blow-dries. Both of the owners were good hairdressers, but good hairdressing isn’t all I learned from them. They taught me that when you have a love and passion for what you do, people will teach you things and give you opportunities without you having to ask.

  Because I wasn’t old enough to start my hairdressing apprenticeship yet, I couldn’t style real clients’ hair. I was only allowed to work on mannequin heads. But I watched everything the stylists did closely as I passed them foils and rollers, and I was such a quick study that ultimately they let me put the rollers in the clients’ hair and back-comb and finish them. Eventually, the owners even let me do hair for some of the salon models.

  It was a quick and dirty education and I loved every minute of it. I knew I had picked the right profession for me and I never looked back. I am not one of those people who floundered about, wondering what they should be when they grew up. I feel lucky and blessed to have known early on and to have achieved what I have in the profession I am so passionate about. I feel sorry for those poor sods wondering if they should go to law school or become a butcher. I never had any doubts about what I
should be doing.

  Raised in strip clubs, I was used to the excitement of a world where people were transforming themselves on a nightly basis. Once I started working, the salon filled that role. I loved the interaction with the people sitting in my chair. Watching their metamorphosis. Seeing their surprise at how wonderful they looked. Particularly with women, I loved the little twinkle in their eye that said, “Wow, I feel really good! I look great!” That was—and still is—quite powerful to me. It’s instant gratification. It doesn’t matter how shitty they have been feeling or how badly their day has gone, in that moment they feel amazing. And the hairdresser has made them feel that way.

  The other part of what I loved about the salon environment was how creative I could be with myself. I could dress however I wanted—within reason—and during the school holidays I could also do crazy things to my hair without having anyone order me to play by the bloody rules. So, as I said before, when I was fifteen, I quit school—I had never been much of a fan of school and had mostly turned up to pass exams and get promoted through the grades. Quitting seemed like a logical choice at the time because I wanted to start my apprenticeship and get my hairdressing license.

  In order to apprentice full-time, I had to move to a larger salon that could afford to pay me and was better equipped to give me the training I needed. So I went to work for a well-known chain located in Southport, a suburb about five minutes’ drive from Surfers Paradise. Between the hairdressers, assistants, and receptionists, it had a staff of about twenty people. Initially, I was a “Saturday girl,” and only worked on the day of the week when the salon was busiest. But I was such a hard worker that after a month, I was employed full-time. Whereas other apprentices were fresh out of school, my Stud Bar experience put me ahead of the game. I’d already worked for a year and I knew how to do all the basics of hairdressing and assisting. What I wasn’t familiar with was the factory-esque atmosphere of chain salons, which tend to have a very heavy turnover of clients.

  Dealing with such a high volume of people taught me how to be efficient with my time and efficient with my skills in order to keep up with the pace. After all, if I ran late and didn’t get a client into a stylist’s chair in time, I was in trouble. A timer would be put on and I would have to wrap a perm in only twenty minutes. There was a lot of structure and emphasis on not delaying the train. But rather than drinking the chain salon Kool-Aid, I used the experience to identify what I would do differently. For example, while some of the stylists were quite talented, they didn’t have the time to do truly creative, innovative work because of the high volume. And customers weren’t really taken care of because of the assembly-line churn. I knew I didn’t want that for my own salon when the time came.

  Because of the way the apprenticeship system was structured in Australia at that time, it took four years for me to become a hairdresser. It wasn’t like beauty school in the States, where kids can do six months of training and take an exam to get their license. The Australian program was quite arduous and you had to really want to be a hairdresser or you wouldn’t last. The apprenticeship consisted of working in a salon and going to technical college one day a week to do a lot of practical work, and learn theory, science, and psychology. But it was really the salon’s job to give you your education and then you sat for exams at the college to progress to the next level. If you failed, you could actually be kicked out. There was a lot of study required to advance and graduate. It wasn’t an easy program. I wasn’t even allowed to cut clients’ hair in the salon until the end of my third year.

  At the time, when you did your apprenticeship, you had to sign “indentured” papers with the salon that employed you. And the program was overseen by the government to make sure you were trained properly at the location where you were employed. Two and a half years into my apprenticeship, I got fired by the chain salon and was in danger of having to put the whole program on hold until I could find a new employer. I was frustrated and devastated by the delay. I had gotten the rough end of the pineapple, and it was all the salon’s fault.

  There were over thirty locations in the chain, so they would hold intrasalon hair competitions where the various branches of the company competed against each other. I was asked to model at one of the hair shows staged in Brisbane. There, one of the stylists from my salon decided to cut and color my hair with really dark purple roots and white-blond tips—don’t judge me, it was the eighties. I liked the way it looked for the show, but when I went back to work, my bosses told me it was too punk for the salon and I had to change it back to just one color. Since I liked my hair blond, the stylist stripped out the dark parts with strong bleach, which resulted in blisters all over my scalp and my hair literally melted off. I looked like a victim of a nuclear attack.

  I started to wear scarves and headbands (did I mention it was the eighties?) to imitate Madonna and pretended it was okay that I was going bald. I was miserable. The blisters hurt like hell and my hair was falling out in clumps. All the while my bosses were telling me that I couldn’t admit to clients what was going on because their fuckup would be bad for business. That really pissed me off. I wasn’t causing a ruckus about my hair—it would grow back—but what was I supposed to do if clients who knew me asked what had happened? I wasn’t going to lie and say I’d fucked it up myself or that I was the victim of a rare disease. So I told the truth and the salon fired me.

  Hypothetically, without employment at the salon, I had to put my apprenticeship—and attending the technical college—on the back burner until I could find another salon that would hire me. But I was popular at the college because I was good at what I did, and I worked so hard that they let me keep attending class. This meant I didn’t fall behind, and in less than a month I found new employment with Stephen Pratt, a salon in Surfers Paradise. He was English and had trained at Vidal Sassoon. His wife was a colorist who he’d met in London, and they owned the Surfers salon together, as well as another one located in Miami Beach, about twenty minutes away. Like the Stud Bar, it was a noncorporate, creative environment and it was great.

  Stephen was an incredibly talented and passionate stylist. He could get lost in a haircut for three hours without realizing it. He always wanted to push the envelope and turn everything on its head—“Okay, so this is the structure of the cut. Now let’s fuck it up by wearing a blindfold to do the same thing and see what happens!” He taught me that you needed to know structure inside and out before you could break it. Like Picasso, he could paint a perfect nude before he started rearranging the body parts on the canvas. Stephen knew how to break the rules because he knew what the rules were.

  However, Stephen didn’t like to say no to his employees very often. His wife, Lea, on the other hand, was a bitch—that’s what everyone called her—and she didn’t mind telling you what you’d done wrong and how you needed to do it right. She ran the business side of things. And she was one of the first “bitches” I really learned from, apart from my mum. While she would get in people’s faces and demand a lot, she was also very fair. They wanted to have a team and they treated us like family. Her door was always open and there would be staff barbecues on the weekends. If you messed up at work, you were toast. But you were also always welcome in their home. Lea taught me a lot about how to be a tough but fair boss and I took those lessons with me into my career. I adored both of them.

  Stephen and Lea were extremely encouraging when I took time off to fly to London for a weeklong hairdressing course at the Vidal Sassoon Training Academy. I was in the last year of my apprenticeship and wanted to improve my skills. I had also never been to Europe, so Mum and I traveled abroad for the first time, spending a week in Paris before heading to London for my class.

  Vidal Sassoon is not only an icon and the godfather of hairdressing, he was my idol. The architect of the low-maintenance, ultrastylish, geometric bob that Nancy Kwan popularized in The Wild Affair, Sassoon’s cutting techniques changed the face of hairdressing. He created Twiggy’s tousled locks, and
cropped off Mia Farrow’s tresses for Rosemary’s Baby. Sassoon transformed a shampoo-and-set society that didn’t really care about the cut into one where it totally mattered. In the process, the man himself became a household name, influencing and inspiring hairdressers around the world. It was my dream to study his techniques at one of his academies. To me, Vidal Sassoon was a rock star; he was the Mick Jagger of hair—albeit more refined.

  When I walked into the academy in Mayfair, I felt like a Catholic entering the Vatican. Everyone was dressed in black, everyone was impeccably put together, and there was a uniformity of appearance and attitude that made it clear everyone had the same values. It wasn’t forced, it wasn’t contrived; it just was. Everyone wanted to be there and everyone did an amazing job. It was fascinating to me because, although I came from a great salon and worked for a great hairdresser, we didn’t have the dress code and disciplined style of communication that was de rigueur at Sassoon. It was obvious that the staff had a profound respect for the man, even though, by then, he was living in California and not really associated with the day-to-day running of the academy. After my first day, I returned to the hotel and told Mum, “I want to be the female Vidal Sassoon.” And I meant it. I would work as hard as I needed to in order to become a great hairdresser.