Danielle at Mike’s Tavern

By NADIA PFLAUM

Danielle seemed pretty shocked that I’d want to take her picture for a fashion blog. She shouldn’t have been. In the midst of Mike’s Tavern, she glowed — and it wasn’t just the rhinestones on her forehead that did it. “I got ’em from my niece, and she got ’em from a Somalian store,” Danielle said. “They’re bindi dots.”

It took a lot of guts to cut all her hair off, Danielle admitted — she did it only three weeks ago. “I’m trying to do new stuff — to let my outside reflect my inside.” She laughed at herself for sounding all metaphysical, but went on. “You know, like, if bad stuff happens to you, it’s like a storm? But it has to rain for something new to grow. So that’s me. Growing. I want new things. The person I was is not who I am now, not who I’m gonna be.”

So she asked her boyfriend — “my honey,” she calls him — to shave her head before work one morning. “I said, cut it all off,” she said. “I put my back to the mirror and he started cutting it and I was catching it in my hands as it fell. And I cried for a little bit — you know, it’s your hair. At first, I didn’t know if I would be okay. But it’s okay.”

It’s more than okay — bald is beautiful. Danielle called her honey — the tallest man in the bar, by a lot — over to say hello. “You’d’a liked the afro, though,” she said. “Wouldn’t she have?” Naturally, her honey agreed.