Tag: Destinee Wright

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Culture

Shear temptations: Hair dos…and don’ts 

Fernando Garay, a master barber, instructor, and owner of House of Cuts Barber Studio, stands outside of his shop, which is closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Cutting hair isn’t just about style, he says. It’s about taking care of people. Photo by Eric Kelley

You’ve thought about it. Looked in the bathroom mirror and considered the scissors in the drawer. Caught your reflection in a car window and wondered if you still have those clippers. Picked up a bowl and contemplated whether those ’90s cuts were all that bad.

Per Governor Ralph Northam’s orders, barber shops and salons are closed as part of social distancing measures, and barbers and stylists are out of work.  You trust them with shears, razors, and all manner of chemicals close to your face (not to mention your personal secrets), so trust them when they advise against cutting your own hair.

Hair says a lot about a person. “If you look good, you feel good,” says Sarah Hatch, master stylist, educator, and owner of Ederra Salon. “And when people are feeling less than good,” like many are right now, “they want instant gratification, to have it done, to feel better.” She understands why people might be tempted to do their own hair, especially if they’re attending work meetings via Zoom.

But Hatch says there are risks to playing salon, particularly in regards to chemical treatments like perms, straighteners, and dyes. One wrong move and you could have a lot less hair to care for.

And when it comes to the cut, well, that’s complicated, too. “Hair cutting is geometry,” says Hatch. No two people have the same head of hair, and so stylists and barbers spend years learning that craft. “Face shapes and other shapes come into play, and if you have any kind of whorls or cowlicks or spins in your hair, you could think you’re cutting half an inch off, but next thing you know, it’s two inches shorter. There’s such a small margin for error, I wouldn’t recommend it.” 

“I can only imagine there will be hair horror stories from people trying to DIY stuff,” agrees Destinee Wright, a stylist specializing in black hair care who runs Luxie Hair Services. “It’s a pandemic. You don’t gotta be cute for a pandemic!”

Destinee Wright of Luxie Hair Services is offering online tutorials for her clients so that they can learn to braid and take care of their own hair during the pandemic. Photo courtesy of subject

But if you must, there are ways to do it, like watching YouTube tutorials for up-dos, or using bobby pins, headbands, and wraps to mix things up. “Get it poppin’ with cute little hair clips. Maybe order some from a small business,” says Wright. “For a lot of natural folks, some of us have dreams of having these big, luxurious afros. [Maybe] now’s the time to let it grow. Just do your research first.”

Wright agrees that hairstyle is tied into self-care, so she’s hosting online braiding tutorials—complete with counseling on technique, products, and tools—for existing clients and anyone else who wants to tune in. 

Fernando Garay, master barber, licensed instructor, and owner of House of Cuts Barber Studio, misses his shop and his people. He’s created a space where his clients, many of whom are young black and Latinx men, can gather and relax, be themselves, and either choose to shoot the shit or have deeper conversations about life’s ups and downs. 

Cutting hair is about more than “keeping the community fresh,” says Garay. It’s about taking care of people, and he’s found that “people take care of you if you take care of them.” One of Garay’s clients has continued to pay for his weekly cuts, even though the shop’s closed. 

“I’ve been there for people’s funerals, I’ve been there for people’s weddings, graduations, all kinds of stuff, even just the everyday ‘need to get clean,’” says Garay. And he’s as committed as ever to supporting his clients: “If I’m not cutting hair, I’m not getting my hair cut,” he says, laughing. “We’re in this together.”

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C-BIZ Magazines

Follow and engage: Charlottesville’s social media business influencers

Jessica Norby, Destinee Wright, and Ahmad Hawkins.

The world of social media marketing—particularly Instagram—is increasingly dominated by influencers, individuals who have amassed a sizable social media following, who’ve gained their audience’s trust, and who can sway consumers’ purchases—or even what they think.

Yet many businesses today—and the strategists behind them—are becoming influencers in their own right, with the power to move products, initiate trends, or shape culture. So what are the top social-media tactics that any local biz can use to “influence” and grow business? We asked three strategists—two who help other businesses use social media effectively, and a third who uses social to creatively engage with fans and support his own business endeavors.—Jennifer Pullinger

BE CONSISTENT

“However they define consistency is what they should stick to. So whether it’s seven days a week or five days a week or three days a week, it should be consistent week-to-week. That will help them get more brand awareness and start to build that community within their own brand so people get used to seeing their posts.”

—Jessica Norby, social media strategist (jessicanorby.com)

BE TARGETED

“I think the best bet for increasing traffic to your socials is to have consistent content that provides some sort of value and speaks to your target consumer. You can’t be everything to everyone, so it’s important to position yourself as the authority in your niche and understand who you’re communicating with and what your audiences enjoy seeing from you.”

—Destinee Wright, owner of Destinee Marketing (hellodestineewright.com)

BE COLLABORATIVE

“That’s the biggest thing you see with YouTube now–[brands are] starting to team up. Before it was just all competition, a dog-eat-dog type of a scene. Now it’s more collaborative with people working together. It’s basically like a crossover. It’s like, ‘I’m going to use your brand to help me reach your audience’ and then vice versa, so now you come together and lo and behold, you have a bigger audience at the end of the day.”

—Ahmad Hawkins, sports media personality, owner of STHU Juice apparel, and host of “The Ball Hawk Show Podcast” (iamballhawk.podbean.com)

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Arts

Getting a lift: Nine Pillars’ female showcase is brimming with talent

Organizers are confident that Thursday’s all-female Rugged Arts showcase is the first of its kind in Charlottesville, featuring a female host, a female DJ and five female artists, including Sierra “Juice” Stanton (pictured). “I only write about what I know, what I’ve been through, what I go through, what I’m preparing for,” says Juice. Photo by Eze Amos

Last April, A’nija Johnson walked into the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center auditorium ready to speak her truth at the Nine Pillars Hip Hop Cultural Fest’s freshman class competition. Wearing a floor-length skirt, a Tasmanian Devil “I need coffee” T-shirt and a pair of sunglasses, the local high schooler found herself in a room full of peers ready to take the mic—all of them boys.

“What are you doing in here?” asked one. “You’ll see,” she told him. By the end of the competition, Johnson, who goes by the moniker Legendary Goddess, had impressed the judges enough to nab second place.

The self-described “girly-girl” loves proving that she can rap—and about everything, from broken friendships to sexual violence. Legendary Goddess takes the mic on Thursday at the all-female Rugged Arts hip-hop showcase at the Music Resource Center as part of the weeklong Nine Pillars Hip Hop Cultural Festival.

The Rugged Arts series began in summer 2013, but organizers Cullen “Fellowman” Wade and Remy St. Clair are confident that this showcase is the first of its kind in Charlottesville, featuring five female artists (Legendary Goddess, MrsAmerica, Juice, Littlebird and Bonnie Cash), a female DJ (DJ Tova) and a female host (Destinee Wright).

“Hip-hop has a reputation for its misogyny and its disregard for women’s agency,” says Wright. “This showcase is a sort of reclamation. I’m hoping that this show will inspire a sense of sisterhood for the hip-hop heads in the community who are woman-identifying, and hopefully inspire other women artists to continue their work and participate in events such as this.”

It’s rare to see a woman on stage at a hip-hop show, says Lamicka “MrsAmerica” Adams. She suspects it’s because many women put their music on the backburner as they build a career, raise a family and take care of elderly family members. So, to shine a spotlight on female artists, “I think it’s really dope,” she says.

MrsAmerica was going through a lot when she wrote her 2017 album, Pain and Pageant—she was pregnant with her third child while taking care of her father, who was dying of cancer. MrsAmerica’s husband encouraged her to write, to put her thoughts to music. She thought, “How can I focus on music at a time like this?” But the more she wrote, the better she felt. “It’s music that would lift me up when I was going through” hell, she says, and she hopes it’ll motivate others, too.

Sierra “Juice” Stanton shares many of MrsAmerica’s reasons for making music. “I only write about what I know, what I’ve been through, what I go through, what I’m preparing for,” says Juice.

Her song “Pain” is about an accident in which she was hit by an SUV while crossing the street. Juice didn’t feel the impact; she remembers waking up on the ground, a paramedic telling her not to move while snapping a brace around her neck. She gets chills when she recites the song. “It’s my heart pouring out in the lyrics, over a beat,” she says, adding that as a woman—and especially as a black woman—she’s very aware of the message she puts out into the world.

“Even if we live what [men] have lived and talk about, it’s different, because we are [women],” says Juice, adding that everything from what women say to the way they carry themselves is watched, and often scrutinized closely.

Harrisonburg artist Kaiti “Littlebird” Crittenden is a self-described “100-pound white girl with blonde hair, a tomboy” clad in beat-up Timberland boots and cargo pants, who says she was initially “pretty intimidated” to start performing her rhymes, in part because she’s not what people typically see in their mind’s eye when they think of a rapper.

“Princess Peach on fleek temperamental / Insecurities plaguing my mental / When ya thin as a pencil / Criticism ain’t gentle / Couple that with the fact / Folks been judgmental,” Littlebird spits in one of her songs. She likes to talk about universal experiences such as love and relationships of all kinds, but she’s keen to point out that there’s substance and feeling underneath the surface.

Long before DJ Tova Roth had DJ equipment, she made mixtapes with a tape deck and a radio. As a teenager in California in the early 1990s, she listened religiously to hip-hop and often drove an hour and a half to Los Angeles where well-known DJs sold their mixtapes. She’d listen to them over and over, noting the artists’ moves so that she could mimic them—and rival them—once she got her own gear.

“I want the industry to realize that girls can bring the heat, and that we’re up for any challenge,” says Legendary Goddess, the high schooler who brought down the house at the Jefferson School just a year ago. And a hip-hop showcase spotlighting a group of talented women is a great place to start.

“We’re making history,” says Juice. “This is major.”

Categories
Arts

Solidarity Cards Project promotes the power of sharing

Want to write your own Solidarity Card? Destinee Wright’s next card-collecting event will be at Healing Through Art & Community with Candy Chang at The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on January 19. Photo by Eze Amos

On November 11 of last year, equipped with a small clipboard, some index cards and a handful of pens, Destinee Wright waited outside the Paramount Theater after a discussion with Spike Lee about race and racial injustice in America, followed by a screening of two Lee documentary films, I Can’t Breathe and 4 Little Girls.

The mood was somber as Wright approached a few filmgoers and asked them to write down on index cards how they were feeling and what was on their minds after seeing the documentaries. Some of the replies were heavy, others were hopeful.

One person leaned on the small clipboard and wrote: “Receive Love. Be Love. Share Love. Repeat. Love is Kind. Love always hopes. Love always perseveres.”

“There’s power in writing your feelings down,” says Wright, an artist who owns and operates Luxie Hair Services, a mobile hair extension and braiding studio. It’s affirming, it’s healing, and it can create a sense of solidarity among people just by opening up a conversation.

Wright began this initiative, now called the Solidarity Cards Project, in November 2016, soon after Donald Trump was elected president. She was a student at the time, and attended a coming together hosted by UVA’s Office of African American Affairs, during which students of color shared what they had experienced and had been feeling in the days since the election. One student spoke of being chased on Grounds; another spoke of seeing a monkey hanging by a rope from a tree, Wright recalls.

Moved by her classmates’ stories, Wright wanted to get these students’ voices out to the rest of the campus while maintaining a safe space for openness and honesty. She remembered a project she’d learned about, El Tendedero/The Clothesline Project, which began in Mexico City in 1978 when Monica Mayer asked women to write down their experiences with sexual assault and then clipped the anonymous pink index cards to a clothesline.

Wright grabbed a stack of index cards from her desk and asked students in her feminist theory class to write down what had been weighing on their hearts post-election. She asked them to be personal, to be honest. She collected more replies from students in other classes.

“I felt like such a crazy person, collecting these cards and not knowing what I was going to do with them initially,” says Wright. She brought her clipboard to the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., on January 21, 2017 and to a Charlottesville community healing event after August 12. She’s offered cards to her hair clients, and while at the Afropunk festival in Atlanta in October, she cut up cardstock from a vendor booth for an on-the-fly alternative.

Sometimes participants write just a sentence or two:

“I’m afraid he’ll allow the world to burn.”

“Ending the drug war will end overdose and mass incarceration.”

“I just want people w/ HIV/AIDS to not be forgotten about in healthcare reform.”

“What is it going to take? How many more people have to die due to gun violence in the U.S. for the government to take ACTION?! [sic] Less guns = less death.”

“I feel detached from many political/social issues that are personal to so many people. I hope to encounter more and more avenues that bring these issues close to home for me.”

Others are longer:

“As a Baptist minister and a woman I am heartbroken and so angry about Donald Trump’s rhetoric. His white supremacy, xenophobia and sexism are not consistent with my beliefs. I have been fighting as hard as I can against the Trump agenda.”

“As an African-American woman who grew up in [The South] only seeing images and video of protesters during the civil rights movement, I never thought I would be in the position to counter-protest white terrorists in my own town. As a mother of children with brown skin, I am terrified of Donald Trump’s America.”

There are cards bearing pro-Trump responses, too, and Wright plans to include them in an exhibit at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative on Saturday, January 20.

So far, she has collected about 300 cards—all of them anonymous, each of them different, many of them posted to the project website and social media accounts—and she’ll install the physical cards at the pop-up event.

Wright hopes that the Solidarity Cards Project will spark conversations—the seemingly small act of reading a single card is, in its own way, a conversation with a complete stranger, and the installation in The Bridge’s small-ish gallery space will offer ample opportunity for conversation among those who attend.

“There’s so much power in just having a discussion,” says Wright. “Even if you don’t have the same views as someone, be open to talking…because you can’t grow, you can’t heal, you can’t have any understanding unless you talk to someone.” And writing it down is a good first step.