My maternal grandmother looked at least ten years younger than she really was all of my life. And I take after her, so absolutely no complaints there. I’m pretty blessed.
I mean there’s been a couple awkward moments professionally. For example: my first Adult Manufacturers of Novelty Expo (AMNE) when Bo, then the sales director for distributor East Coast News (ECN), came to have a heart to heart and encourage Tantus even though they weren’t buying our dildos yet and said all this to my friend/ employee Sherri who I’d brought because she had owned a store in Sacramento that sold adult products and was more familiar with the people (she also had 10-12 years on me). But I’ve aged well.. it was all good.
Then again, women in the adult industry when I began back in the late 1990’s were pretty damned attractive by anyone’s barometer. It was an industry where men could show up with balding hair and pot bellies, but I can’t recall any grey-haired women at the trade events. Frankly the women were all sexy as hell; they weren’t all young but they all had so much personality and style.
I wore my youth in long tresses. My hair is thick and wavy so it actually framed my long-angled face. The only haircut I’d ever tried and liked had been when I was in second grade and got a shag. I looked great in a shag, but I looked great with long dark hair.
Let’s face it, I may wear a suit and tie (with a proper half windsor) but I’m gonna rock it with a little edginess. That’s just me. BeBe was in, I wore a size 2 to a size 4 depending on the cut and I was not afraid to show the top of my thong as I bent over setting up my booth. Perhaps the tie tied correctly was already edgy…
In 2005 I mixed it up by bleaching my front hair blond.
I remember getting a call from Kim Airs as I drove to Vegas for an International Lingerie Show. She was asking if Annie Sprinkle could stay in my room. She’d just published a book and it was being distributed by Entrenue and she was scheduled to be in their booth, but she didn’t have a room. I’d never met Annie Sprinkle but I had been a student at SFSU when she was doing her one woman show, letting the audience come up and see her cervix and I’d missed that… If Annie Sprinkle needed a place to sleep, she was sleeping with me (or in the bed next to mine).
The picture of her and I lets me know that this was the first bleach. Ugh orange hair.
Every time I go to a hairdresser they ask- what color do you want. It was always black and white. Steph even after 7 or 8 years would ask and then say- “I just want to make sure:”
My hair went from long to asymmetrical to short back to the shag of my elementary years but it was consistently black and white.
My grandmother had dyed her dark hair starting when she was 17 and found her first grey. I’d actually been home dying mine since about 2000 when I was starting to see more than a couple greys. This regime of going to the hair dressers and keeping the roots consistent with the rest- OMG.
Every 4-6 weeks having the roots done. God forbid I needed to find a new hair person (usually cause I moved and the first tries in the new neighborhood were shit). I did it though— I liked my edge.
At some point I became more aware that I was supposed to be “branding” myself with my wares but actually it was before 2005 that I put a Bend Over Beginner harness over my suit pants and strolled at ILS (it was vibrating and I’d accidently bump into friends- what can I say, I was happy to see them).
Tantus tried to come out with a kinky line in 2005 with a Topping Kit and a Bottoming Kit, but it didn’t fly (and no I don’t believe strap-on play is inherently kinky). By 2017 we didn’t care, we wore leather and made gags, fantasy play strap-ons (Hello Nurse!), had some HUGE anal toys, and made some amazing silicone paddles. And Mike, my partner/ husband/ Tantus CEO at the time and I, started BIDO with toys like we used to see and buy in Gay Toy stores back in the 90’s and early 2000’s.
Once we showed the brass nipple clamps, leather floggers and paddles and the titanium canes… we were pretty much OUT.
It’s funny actually, I didn’t sleep with others in the industry. I watched everyone sleep with others and I did not mix my business with my pleasure. But the weird thing was- no one really ever actually came onto me. They respected my aloofness. I asked Mike why he though no one ever propositioned me and he said it was easy- with Metis, who talked about sex and toys like she knew a lot… “With you, you were gonna have to bring your A game.”
My employees got laid. I only went to bed with those I brought with me, and once a person that I’d arranged to have meet and stay naked in my room through a Vegas event (first person I ever got to anally fist! Woohoo…2003ish).
Fashion came and went but my black and white hair… that was timeless. Rouge had it in the X-Men movies, but I had it first.
And then came Covid. And the first thing they did in Northern Nevada, where I was living and working, was shut down the hair salons. Now it wasn’t like we were traveling and doing shows so what ever, except… my world was kind of falling apart, my shoulders sloped, my ego was bruised, I was teetering near depression— least my hair could have been cool. As the months wore on and it totally became a free for all I grabbed my grandmother’s hair thinning scissors and started chopping.
I may not be able to get nice and neat but I can punk it like hell and say “Fuck it!” And every few days I’d see another flat surface and layer it up some more.
I grew up in the suburbs of the Bay Area and yes, The Dead Kennedy’s did play at one of our high school dances (I did not go because no one knew the Dead Kennedy’s were playing- they had an alias band name- and I was not the kid who went to school dances). We didn’t actually see punk hair in my neighborhood until a few years later. But it’s an aesthetic that is classic- like a good shag.
Steph, my hair dresser from Reno actually told me a story from maybe a year before Covid came. She was volunteering doing hair styles for homeless people and all the women who came to sit for her and have their hair done all wanted shags! Mrs Brady all the way.
When I finally got back to her shop, I’d forewarned Steph what I’d done. She took one look at it and said “you used thinning scissors huh- looks great.”
Back to the bleach and the dye.
And so it was until I moved to the PNW and Covid still had everything up here “by appointment only”- which is easy when you have someone you go to but when you don’t OMG.
I asked the one former Tantus employee who lives in my new city. Her hair had been pink when she worked for me more than a decade ago— she must know all the good hair people who do great dye work. Nope, that was so long ago. She wears her naturally brown hair proudly now with a natural grey streak, and is as stunning as ever. But she did ask around to her friends. I got in. I had my hair dyed and it was awful. I tried once more… nope.
Retirement allowed me to go grey and see how much my white naturally grew where I’d been bleaching. After thinking about it for quite some time and waiting for the weather to warm I got out the shears and shaved the back. I kept the white front ala a Chelsey- the punk rock hair cut best known on Tank Girl. It rocks but the PNW is cold and it grows 2 cm and I find I have the most knarly cowlicks poking up at extremely odd angles.
I’m not sure I like it as it is, but I may never be professional again.