Denise Edgar, owner of St. Louis' acclaimed D-Zine Hair and Art Studio.
As Told To Jeannette Batz Cooperman
Photograph By Mark Gilliland
Her dad drank and her parents fought, so she started running away from home in the seventh grade. Branded "incorrigible," she spent time in detention, dropped out of school, married young--desperate to create the family she longed for--then divorced and fell in love with a wealthy Muslim "whose family would have killed him if they knew we'd slept together." When he went back to Indonesia, she learned he'd set up a trust for her tuition. "I never stopped honoring the opportunity he gave me," says Edgar, owner of the acclaimed D-Zine Hair & Art Studio.
If someone says, "Looks don't matter"? My short answer might be, "When did you die? Because you killed off a part of your life that didn't have to be such a burden. When did you give up?"
Looking like you don't care for yourself is exactly that.
On the other hand, if you have to be beautiful and the only thing you have to offer is being beautiful, you have lost yourself.
Hair is such a sensual expression of self. And everybody's is different. It identifies your culture, which flock you belong to, sometimes even your religion, and certainly your sex.
One of the people I've always wanted to make over is Janet Reno. Someone hates her. And she hates herself. I would pay her to let me make her over.
We all talk about being open, really open, hip and liberal--ha! We are unwilling to trust another person.
St. Louis has an absolutely fundamental resistance to change. How does that affect the arts? It keeps them mysterious. It keeps them invalid. And it keeps them small.
St. Louisans play very small. They don't create dreams big enough to have together.
Are we all so resigned that we couldn't make a difference? Or did someone just tell us that and we believed it?
We don't allow for mistakes here. Nobody forgives anybody in this town.
Sometimes I think it's a miracle when everybody shows up. It's like a symphony.
Three wishes: That human beings would never ever lie again. Not a baby, not a criminal, not a lover. That all children were loved and taken care of--even the old ones like us. That world peace would last forever. I'd stay up all night and spend all my money on it.
Why is peace so hard to attain? Because we are bored. That's why we have fashion, that's why we divorce, that's why we have so many kinds of salad dressing, and that's why we have war.
People who are shut down to love as a possibility for themselves can't imagine it as a way for a civilization to exist.
Do you hear our politicians calling for love? No. They'd have to give up being right and honor people's differences.
When the war in Iraq is won, the world will not be better; it just won't. We've done this enough times; we know this.
People lie because they don't feel safe telling the truth. Our whole society is based on lying. Admit who you are.
You can't forgive enough. You can't. There is no end to forgiving.
As Jimmy Buffett said, kids are a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling, an amnesic episode that never went away. They are complicated and they need help and you have to be there. But what if it wasn't just you who had to be there? What if we all raised these kids?
When I see kids fighting on the street, I say, "Hey, guys, is that working for you?" My kids are mortified. I say, "Do you think the whole world didn't raise you?"
What I want on my tombstone? "Loved my life and had a blast--every wretched, wonderful moment of it."
