When Cher, Diana Ross and Madonna come to Barry Hendrickson’s Bitz-n-Pieces, they come to buy a wig. When RuPaul and Lypsinka, two prominent drag artists, come to Bitz-n-Pieces, they buy wigs, too. But when chemotherapy patients come to Bitz-n-Pieces, Hendrickson and his staff are adamant: They are not buying wigs. They are buying medical hair prosthetics. Or their insurance won’t pay for them.
“The term you use makes a difference,” Hendrickson said. “A girl finds out she has cancer, needs a wig, gets depressed and finds she suddenly has to pay all this money and the insurance company won’t cover it. We tell her to be strong with them.”
And that is only one of the bits of advice Hendrickson and his staff give their salon’s customers. The professionals, of course, choose Bitz-n-Pieces for the quality, styling and durability of the wigs, made for strenuous use under movie lights and life on the road. But for the woman diagnosed with cancer who suddenly finds her life threatened and her appearance compromised, Hendrickson and company are nothing less than guardian angels.
They counsel her on making the adjustment to the rude toll chemotherapy takes on the most visible part of her life’s currency: her looks. They can tell her exactly how long after she starts chemotherapy she can expect her hair to fall out, how that will happen and what she can do to prepare.
In fact, anyone at Bitz-n-Pieces can discuss in detail the side effects of the most common chemotherapy treatments: the CAF cocktail, Adriamycin, Taxol and the CMF cocktail. While the first three are aggressive enough to cause total hair loss, they say, CMF causes only a 20 percent hair loss.
Why do they know so much? More by happenstance, it turns out, than design. Bitz-n-Pieces opened on New York’s West Side in 1991. Before that, Hendrickson was the wig master for the Joffrey Ballet, ran a chain of wig stores on Long Island and had the wig concession at Fiorucci, where he sold a punk line of wigs — pieces like purple Mohawks and pink hair additions — to clients who included Divine and Andy Warhol.
When Fiorucci closed, he moved to Trocadero, where he ditched the chartreuse spikes and tried more natural, though still youthful, looks. His customers followed, and brought their friends with them, the ones in chemotherapy.
“These girls in their 20s who were going through breast cancer would come in,” Hendrickson recalled recently. “And I would ask `what are you on anyways?’ They would tell me about the side effects of the medicines, what they were going through and how they handled it. I memorized it all and started passing on tidbits of advice to new clients. It’s easier to handle a situation when you have all the information, instead of not knowing what’s going to happen next.”
Hendrickson, 48, talked downstairs in the salon’s storage room, surrounded by boxes and swatches of hair.
“We tell them what to anticipate,” he said. “Though we ask first if they want to hear it. Some people are still in denial and say `No, I want to take the hair and go,’ though very few do.
“The doctor will say to the patient, `With this treatment you’ll require a wig’ and usually that’s it,” he continued. “They are there to cure the problem, not to make the patients look lovely. But a person is left devastated having to deal with it. Her beauty is altered, there’s a big paranoia.
“In the beginning, some people don’t even care about the cancer, they’re more worried about their looks. We tell them that you don’t lose hair on the first treatment. It takes up to three weeks for treatments to react, though some are quicker than others. The medicine doesn’t kill the follicle, it anesthetizes it, puts it into a sleep stage.
“And we don’t say the hair `falls out.’ We say it `releases.’ Falling out is scary, like it’s never coming back. We let them understand this is a temporary situation and before you know it, your hair is on its way back.”
Upstairs then were two customers; one who was new to chemotherapy, meeting with Gwen Bourhis, the salon manager, in a private room for consultations, and an older woman with run-of-the-mill thinning hair, trying on a more luxurious blond ponytail over her own. She was shown how to pull some of her own hair through it and suddenly, she had quite a mane.
While Bitz-n-Pieces sells wigs and hair pieces only, Hendrickson and his staff also preach the benefits of makeup. “Powder and paint makes you what you ain’t,” Hendrickson proclaimed, laughing. “The question we ask our customers on chemotherapy is `Do you want to look like you feel, or better?’
“With chemo, their eyebrows are lost and their lashes thin down. But it all comes back. We tell them right away to start playing with the brows, see where they are. Use a little color, put on the hair. Illusion is all we are. And the woman has to feel comfortable with the idea that you become an illusionist during this time. They think the whole world knows, but nobody gets it.”
Laurie Beechman agrees. A Broadway actress and singer, she has been a customer of Hendrickson’s since 1989, when she was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She had come that day to have her wigs re-styled.
“I had started with a strange-looking wig that looked like half a bowling ball,” she recalled. “But the way he cut it was so hip, youthful. I felt like myself. When you get cancer, God, you’re so altered. To look in the mirror and recognize yourself is wonderful. Being sick, there’s a tremendous frustration at being unable to control your body, and when things are beyond your control, it really helps to feel good from the outside.
“Also, Barry’s sensitive to the highs and lows of being on medicine. When the 17th day hits on one drug, the hair comes out in handfuls. It’s so hard to believe it will happen though, even if you’re told. I didn’t, until the day it was in my hands that first time.”
