Hairdressing Van Gogh
A hairdresser is a significant person in life. Taking the seat in front of the mirror while the hairdresser spreads the cloth to cover, you can be compared to Vincent Van Gogh picking up the brush to cover a blank canvas with a field full of sunflowers. You are lucky if in life you have found a hairdresser who can light you up like that. The hairdresser not only makes sense of the foliage on your head but also relieves you of your mental spasms.
Vincent Van Gogh once wrote to his sister in 1890 that his sunflowers were “almost a cry of anguish while symbolising gratitude in the rustic sunflower,” an image that uplifted his spirits in troubled times. A hairdresser is a lot like this legendary painter. Van Gogh was also known to have a very foul mood, unlike the sunny disposition of his paintings. His hairdressers dreaded his visits because he would never sit still, burden them with his problems and leave them with miniature paintings of his sunflowers as tips. After everything Van Gogh put them through, they felt they deserved actual money as tips, the sunflowers did nothing for them, and they were running out of space to store similar-looking paintings. Because Van Gogh was difficult but a legend, the hair salon owner he used to visit frequently assigned three of his best hairdressers. The three hairdressers were under a lot of stress, and Van Gogh’s foul mood took a toll on their mental health.
When they could take no more, they decided to speak to their unapproachable boss and request a change in customer. The boss was blinded by Van Gogh’s sunflowers and did not want to hear a word against him. He did not want any change in the status quo if he lost Van Gogh as a customer. This would not be good for business, and he would not have anything to boast about when he met his friends over drinks every weekend. The three hairdressers were especially disappointed when the owner accused them of not having the right attitude towards their work.
Their complaints, however, did not fall on deaf ears. While getting his own hair dressed, the boss thought about this difficult situation and decided to find a solution. He asked his hairdresser, a former physicist, to help him find a way out so that the three hairdressers feel motivated again. Removing them off the job was not an option because Van Gogh, as difficult he was, would never agree to a change of hands that handled his head. The physicist was a huge fan of Newton’s first law of motion – that any object at rest or in motion will continue to be so unless acted upon by an external force. So they decided to propel the three hairdressers into space for a short ‘Space Holiday.’
The physicist assured the boss that this would truly lighten the burden that was stifling the three hairdressers. On hearing this suggestion, the boss turned around to look at the ex-physicist with such force that the scissor he was holding almost missed piercing his nose. The boss did not have to explain much, and the ex-physicist assured him that this was doable. He still had friends in the physics community, and he knew a handful of them working in Elon Musk’s Space X program, which was trying to reduce space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars. There was news that in an upcoming mission, two NASA astronauts, Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, will be traveling to the International Space Station in a privately funded spacecraft, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule. For the mission, the astronauts needed three hairdressers to accompany them. The mission required the astronauts to lie on their backs, facing in the direction of travel to reduce the stress of high acceleration on their bodies. Space X wanted to make sure that the astronauts looked amazing in all the photographs taken during their mission, especially when they successfully returned to earth. Because they had to lie down in the capsules, the hairdressers were always needed to keep their hair in order.
The boss jumped at this opportunity as this would mean more publicity for his salon. Having Vincent van Gogh, NASA, and Space X as clients would triple his business overnight.
