| Ken Paves: Cosmic Hair Travels |
| Karen M. Shelton |
| Date: 10/26/2003 |
Introduction Monday, October 20th was the last time I had managed to track Ken Paves via his cell phone to his family's home base near his Sterling Heights, Paves Salon & Spa. As always, Ken was "running late" to watch one of his beloved nieces play soccer on "his day off". He was driving around searching for the sports event while talking at least 100 miles a minute. I managed to ask him a few quick "what's going on with his hair projects" questions and tell him that I wouldn't be able to attend his upcoming press conference in New York City the following week. Since I am up to my eyeballs in several Paves writing projects and have one billion unanswered questions, I begged and pleaded for more phone time. Before I could extract a potential time when I could catch him again, there it was, the familiar click...dial tone...that often signals the abrupt end of our hurried phone interactions. As the hours passed into extended PavesMIA days I could only imagine what had happened to him. I tried tracking him through his NYC press agency. Calls to his LA home, the Paves Salon and his cell went unreturned. Geez, where could he be? Everyone that I managed to find and grill for info was totally clueless to Ken's actual whereabouts. Speaking of clueless, I was amused to finally get an unexpected call six days after our last hurried chat, on a broken cell phone from an exceptionally frazzled Ken. As he jabbered away he was driving frantically in his G500 towards his scheduled Los Angeles Cosmo shoot with a major celebrity whose identity he was not at liberty to share. Grrrrr. Talking faster than one million miles a minute, or so it seemed at the time, Ken gave me the abbreviated version of his life since our last phone interaction. From what I could piece together from the snippets and snappets of travels, Ken spent part of the week working on clients at the Pave Salon. He spent the rest of the days literally running through an assortment of airports on hair and fashion emergencies. Somewhere wedged into the week he flew to some undisclosed location to work with Jessica Simpson's hair for a big event. Then he jumped another plane for some other undisclosed hair emergency. Ken, who it seems is always "running a little late" reported, at the "request of Oprah", he had also hopped on a last minute flight to the northern boonies of Michigan where he had participated in a "makeover ambush" of a surprised couple for Oprah's upcoming November 10th show. Ken explained that after finishing the ambush and overhauling the hair for the makeover segment, he rushed to the airport, "with moments to spare" to get back to Los Angeles in time for today's Cosmopolitan shoot with The Big Star.
Murphy's Law Of Airport Traumas was in full operation as he literally ran for his plane. Ken made it just in time to the boarding gate to discover a completely oversold plane just as it was about to back away from the gate. Desperate to get back to the Cosmo shoot, Ken wound up through a series of garbled hijinks paying a women to give up her seat on the plane to Ken. Once he made it back to LA he realized, to his horror, that he did not have Canvas, his celebrated wig head. Since Ken relies heavily on Canvas to style the various hair pieces and wigs that are part of any Cosmo shoot, he was driving around in circles looking for a beauty supply store or shop where he could buy an emergency replacement wig head (Canvas Wannabe). Thinking he finally had achieved some semblance of a workable plan, he received a frantic call from the Cosmo folks reminding him that today was the Daylight Savings switchover and he was late for the shoot. As Ken would say in RickyRicardo-ese "EYE, YIII, YIII" During all of this drama, Ken also discovered his cell phone was broken in multiple pieces. As he juggled ruptured, tapped together pieces of his handset while trying to locate a wig head replacement and get to the Cosmo shoot, Ken was talking nonstop to me on the fractured phone. As he missed his turn, cars started honking at him in the background. Ken promised to give me every single detail of how he does The Star's hair for Cosmo. Well, only when The Star and her people say it is OK to talk about it. He did confirm that he planned on adding "tons of spot extensions" to get that gorgeous sultry sweeping curtain of hair that is part of the Cosmo Cover Girl look that has persisted in one form or another for years. Which is why he was frantically searching for a wig head form so he could prepare the clip on hair pieces for the shoot before he pieced them in The Star's hair. I teased him that if he couldn't eventually tell me the name of The Big Star that I would eventually find out when I spied his name on the inside cover of the magazine. Cosmo always provides credits for the hairstylist in the little column that discusses the cover shot. Then he started to explain something else about his hair schedule injecting his famous "yipp yipp yipp" to end the sentence. I prepared myself for the inevitable. It came in an instant. Click...dial tone....and he was gone. Another day in the cosmic celebrity hair neighborhood. |