Sarah

The first time I saw Sarah, all I could see was this shark back-pack with giant jaws full of teeth printed on it. There's little else I remember about how she looked that day. That was about seven-plus years ago.


It's great to see a new face, but what about the old ones? I had the privilege to reconnect with an acquaintance from high school, via Facebook.


I met Sarah at a meeting for the Christian club on campus. I think she sat at the desk in front of me. I just remember finding her backpack odd, yet hoping that this cool, quirky upperclassman might actually talk to lowly freshman me. It turned out that Sarah was actually the cousin of my longtime best friend, Alissa. Small world. Sadly, despite this mind-blowing association, we just never did get the chance to actually hang out or develop much of a friendship (Beyond her doing my hair a few years later for Alissa's wedding. Random).
However, I recently posted some random Facebook status on craving Chinese-style stewed pig's feet, and she was curious enough to respond. That prompted me to answer with a "How the heck are ya?" post to her wall, and I figured, since it's been over seven years, I might as well get the full scoop and do a full interview. This is the result.


Little Sarah liked dogs. She wanted to make them better when they got sick. The life of a vet was what she was bound for. (Not so much anymore. Dogs are too needy for her liking at this point in her life.) Then, it came time to think about higher education. She applied to Redeemer University of Ontario, Canada, and some other college, maybe in Tennessee, maybe not, whose name she cannot quite recall. All she knew was that it was FAR from the wretched, soul-sucking, humid heat of Sarasota, Florida. At this point, there was no particular occupational direction, just the general goal of getting further educated, and further from Florida.
"Somewhere between my dad discouraging me from going to my dream school in Canada, and my first semester at Manatee Community College [Now called State College of Florida] I reached a weird realization. I was, and still to some degree am, convinced that I was made to be a mortician."


Heads up. She is not a mortician. She is currently a hairstylist at Fantastic Sam's in Traverse City, MI.
"It's nothing fancy, but they know how to take good care of stylists, and it's hella clean!"
In April, she will have been in Michigan two years. This suits her well, and her love for cold and snow. Sarah has been licensed as a stylist for about four and a half years now, and enjoys it more than she had originally anticipated. Ironically, the origin of this career path was a branch off her former mentioned dream of undertaking. "I thought about the business, and how a lot of them are family owned and operated. Since I have not family in the business, not even a friend, I thought that I could get my foot in the door at a funeral home as a licensed cosmetologist. I thought I could cultivate a relationship with a mortuary business by decorating the heads of their deceased and preserved customers."
BRILLIANT! Take note, all you dreamers of impossible dreams! If it doesn't look like you belong in the lobby, sneak through the back door!
Unfortunately, this dreamer was hit with a bit of a set back when, halfway through her cosmetology program at Sarasota County Technical Institute, she discovered that morticians do not generally like to hire outside cosmetologists. 


In her own words: 


Despite being completely crushed with discouragement I continued on, and came to like it. A blessing in disguise.  If I hadn't decided to go ahead and get my license, and start working for a salon, I never would have met my fiance. In the first six months of working at a Regis corp. owned salon, Mia & Maxx, I met Levi. I didn't want to believe that I was so interested in him at first, seeing as how I was dating someone else at the time, but it didn't take long for me to realize that Levi is my soulmate. My mother even told me that she knew we would get married. A few months into our budding romance I was riding in his car, and Barry White came on the radio. As "Can't Get Enough of Your Love" played, he put his hand on my knee, and said, "What do you think about playing this for our first song when we get married?". How cute is he? I told my mom about how cute that was, and she admitted to me, "I knew you two would get married the moment I met him," which was briefly at the salon one afternoon when the two of us were manning the salon together on a slow day. We will be married in the fall of 2013. TOTALLY. EXCITED.


Sarah has not completely given up on potentially finding her way to mortuary school, but before then, she has other dreams. She would also love to be traversing the world with her love, Levi, educating and performing for hairstylists around the globe. 


Sarah is fairly sure her parents met at church, sometime in the winter, in the area of Rochester, NY. Though it's just the four of them in her immediate family (mom, dad, brother, and Sarah), with 20+ aunts, uncles, and majorly fun cousins, she likes to say she has a pretty decent sized family. Though close in heart, the physical distance is terrible. Between her family in NY and in Florida, Sarah has a lot of family to miss, "seeing as how we grew up together, eating beets together, bucking eggs, and visiting each other in the time out chair Nana loved so much to put us in."


A lot of who Sarah is today, is because of her family:


My family has taught me the difference between a love that is true, and the love of someone who thinks they're better than you. I hope to glean from that, how to better treat those who I love. Growing up with my brother has taught me patience and understanding. He has overcome so many challenges, and he's still working on some of them, but he's taught me that not everyone is working under "normal" circumstances.  I've seen how our family had been judged by others, and realized how unfair it is to pass judgment on a situation you've never been in yourself. It's still hard though sometimes, because I'm pretty sure that the people above my apartment smoke crack with two babies in their dwelling, which enrages me. My mom drilled in me as a child, "Treat others the way you would like to be treated," it's all you can do!


Physical Description in Her Own Words: My hair is in a pony tail, because I was doing house chores earlier, and didn't want it in my face. I am wearing pajamas pants that my mom bought me close to 10 years ago. I've set the ladies free inside an extremely oversized black tshirt, with a screen print design of the rap star Ol' Dirty Bastard on it which reads "HAVE YOU SEEN HIM?" I don't know what it means, and I couldn't sing you an ODB song, or rap you an ODB rap, but I pulled this shirt, and a bright yellow one with a big purple tupac on it out of a dumpster behind the Sarasota Square Mall, perfectly folded with a tag still on it, from Hot Topic, on my birthday. How could I resist?


Things that Make Sarah Smile REAL BIG: (1) Kittens. "The only thing that's made the past couple years just less than perfect is the fact that I need cats in my life. They don't lick your mouth like dogs." (2) Knitting. "So sedentary which is not great for a fatty like myself, but it takes me straight to my happy place." (3) Crafting. "Almost any kind of crafting can put an enormous grin on my face. (4) Friends and Family. Nuff said. (5) Laughing. "Levi likes to tickle, and who really likes being tickled? I always tell him how much I hate it, and one day, I asked him why he does it when he knows that I don't like it. His response was that he just likes hearing me laugh and squeal uncontrollably. That's pretty cute. I still try to fight him, but I hate it less now that I know he's just making me laugh. The laughing part is pretty darn good."


Best Memory: The first one that comes to mind is her 4th birthday, when Grandma Stephens built a snowman cake for her birthday. It was basically a giant popcorn ball shaped like Frosty. It was also her very first experience with snow. Thus, the grand epiphany that she knew she was not made for the south. Another fantastic memory from the same period of her life was the day she got the baby brother she had prayed for every day for as long as she could remember. "Wouldn't trade him for the world."

Most Embarrassing Moment (I'll let her tell it in her own words, because it's pretty priceless): In sixth grade I perioded myself. Period. Actually, there is a little more to it. It wasn't the first time. I knew it was all coming out down there. First of all, pads are disgusting. I always hated seeing that bloody mess inside my panties, but this time was particularly off-putting because I was sitting in my world cultures class telling myself, "If you get up out of this chair, everyone is going to see your period pants." Eventually, I convinced myself that worse things could happen, like if I continued to sit there, I might have to clean a puddle of menstrual blood out of my manila envelope colored chair. Actually, worse things did happen. When I called our teacher's aide to the bathroom near the back of our portable classroom to tell her about this little problem of mine, she escorted me to the clinic, where I called my mother to bring me a change of pants, and ultimately tried convincing her to let me come home, and explain to everyone at school the next day that I got sick, but was completely well now. Instead, I came back to class wearing jeans instead of shorts, and I can't think of a person who DIDN'T notice my quick change. Here I am fearing that my pad might fail me yet again, and everyone asking me if I peed myself. Looking back, I should have just said, "Nope. I perioded myself." I feel like that might have stopped people in their tracks. Instead, I told everyone that I had a hole in my pants. A rather believable argument I thought. Nope. The next two and a half years everyone who could remember the day I changed from shorts to jeans referred to me as "Sarah Sprinkler, the girl who pissed herself in the sixth grade." Only one of the reasons that I hate most people today, and myself a little bit.


If Sarah happened to bump into her 16 year old self, she would advise her to, "Do well in school, don't worry about what people tell you you can or cannot do, keep playing the saxophone, and go to college wherever the hell you want. Don't be afraid of student loans. Anyone who has ever been successful in life has had to pay them off too. It also wouldn't hurt you to drop a few pounds. Take care of yourself. ALSO, go see Zoolander in theaters! totally worth it!"




Well Sarah, if we are still friends when I die, I won't ask you to give my Eugoogly, but I may ask you to do my hair and make up Blue Steel style. How BAMF would it be to be buried that way?