BITE: Tipping the Velvet (Mafia)

You know you’ve heard it: if the owner of a salon cuts your hair, you don’t have to tip. It’s one of those beauty myths that I always just accepted as fact. When I asked Hairanoia salon owner Michael DeSalvo about it, he got his Sicilian on. “That’s fucking bullshit,” the goateed stylist yelled, “Who ever thought that up had their head up their ass.” Salty, Michael. Props.

Turns out potty-mouthed DeSalvo is on the money when it comes to tipping. “If the salon owner is also your stylist,” beauty expert Julyne Derrick writes, “then yes, you should tip him the same as your would a stylist who is not an owner. In the old days one didn't tip the stylist if he owned the salon, but times have changed and it's now protocol to tip.”

Real Simple limits tipping salon owners to “major metropolitan areas,” but DeSalvo is unswayed. “Think about it,” he begins, “I have one client who tips me and one who doesn’t. They both want to come in and there’s only one opening. Who do you think is going to get it? And another thing, it’s always the people that roll up in Mercedes that pull this shit. It’s very old school.”

“Listen,” DeSalvo continues, “I have one client that was blacklisted by McCarthy. That’s how old he is. He comes in and he tells me what he’s going to pay. He says, ‘Listen kid, I’ll give ya $12.’ And I let him. I even do a sliding scale for people who can’t afford a haircut.” It should be noted that at $17 a clip, Hairanoia is quite reasonable.”

“When you get me,” DeSalvo beams, “you get all of me. I walk you in the door, shampoo your hair and cut it. That’s not worth a couple of extra bucks?”

BITE: Paris Is Burning's My New BFF

In 1990, documentary filmmaker Jennie Livingston released her seven-year labor of love Paris Is Burning. The film chronicled disenfranchised members of a New York subculture composed of various houses, or loose familial amalgams of young queens miles away from Fashion Avenue, yet close enough to hold a mirror up to its gorgeous excess.

These queens walked the runway in elaborate drag balls where members of competing houses would imitate everything from high fashion models to urban roughnecks in the category “banjee realness,” or as its explained in the film, “looking like the kind of girl that walks her little brother to school.”

Livingston’s film grossed almost four million dollars domestically, gangbusters for a nonfiction feature. Three months before Livingston’s Toronto International Film Festival debut, Madonna’s song “Vogue” hit the top of Billboard’s Hot 100. That song, and accompanying David Fincher video, provided a slick backdrop for the intricate gesture and tableaux freeze movement vocabulary approximating the titular fashion magazine come to life.

Over the course of one summer, two white women loosed the perfect storm, unleashing queer black culture on an unsuspecting pop landscape. Over the next fifteen years, New York’s landscape changed so dramatically that drag queens and hustlers fronting pier culture — so named for the abandoned West Village piers on which houses would gather to “do shows” — were replaced by manicured Rollerblade paths trafficked by aerodynamic, three-wheel, jog strollers. Paris had burned.

Cut to 2005. Livingston’s film has its long-awaited DVD release ($23.99) and a full-on Vogue resurgence fires up in London, bringing piers queens back like phoenix from the flame. Maybe. There are still aerodynamic, three-wheel, jog strollers, but some of the children are vogueing.