Hairdressing and casual Mufti

You know what we used to employ the flat-iron for? Kids arts and crafts projects. The shirts were dropped at the cleaners and returned back to us pressed and starched. Now, the flat-iron is being used at its most original designation…

Over the weekend, I got myself a haircut. Not bad at all. Much better than anything I used to get in New Jersey. Of course, I often went all the way to Brooklyn to have my hair cut by my own Uncle, but there have been occasions when I could not figure the schedule to do that, and venturing to a local barbershop almost always left an indelible mark. A mark that required a couple of weeks to stop being obvious… Here, I went to one of the corner barbershops for the second time, and came away quite happy.

The interesting thing is that hairdressing is a young man’s job here. Every time I walk by a barbershop, I notice that majority of coiffeurs are guys in their early twenties. Based on my experience, these guys do quite a good job. It is a very fashionable profession at the moment. Which proves how world is cyclical. Think back to your historical image of a barber – you would definitely imagine him as a man. Yet, despite my own grandfather and his son (my Uncle Peter) having been barbers their entire lives, I always tend to think of the profession more in terms of hairdresser, which is somehow a feminine term…

Becky had her own hairdressing fun. She came to school wearing an extension hairpiece with multiple thin braids, her own hair made up in a bun underneath. The color of artificial braids so closely matched her own hair color that her classmates were completely duped. Several people had asked her how long it took to braid her hair before she cracked and explained the ruse.

Her school actually had a couple of days of casual dress, meaning that she did not have to put on her uniform. The occasion is called Mufti Day. I looked the word up and the Wiki definition was a Muslim jurist expert in the religious law. ?!?! Stupefied, I looked for more definitions and encountered civilian clothes worn by a person who usually wears a uniform. Whew… makes sense. The uniform does look quite ugly on our beautiful child, so we welcomed the chance to leave it at home almost as much as she did. Well, to be honest, not even remotely as much, compared to the joy Becky herself expressed.

I’ll go for a shorter post today. Next time, a report on our new camera.

As a parting shot, though, here is a sample of Kimmy’s schoolwork. The subject is religious education, and the study was of Nativity. Notice the star in the sky…