Christmas with the stylists upstairs

Early last December, a grinch showed up in Ursula Heidenwag’s life and almost stole her Christmas. At the time, hardly a soul even knew.

I know Ursula because she owns the Upstairs Salon, where I’ve been getting my hair cut and colored for several years. She opened the business at the corner of Warner Avenue and Bolsa Chica Street in 1987. With a steady group of hairdressers and technicians and their steady clients, the business flourished.

Ursula liked the upstairs location and never imagined the salon being anywhere else. For years, she had a good lease; she always paid her rent on time. There was no reason in her mind to think she’d ever be asked to leave.

Then the long-time owner of the building sold it. The new owner soon offered her a deal -- a rent rate and a yearly 10% increase she simply couldn’t afford. So on Dec. 1, 2004, with Christmas just three weeks away, she was told she had to be out of the premises by the end of the month.

“That is what I was confronted with,” she says. “That [was] terrible. To relocate a whole business -- and each [hairdresser and technician] has their own little business -- you can’t do that in such a short time. It doesn’t work.”

Ursula figured she had two options: either go out of business, leaving her staff to find other places to work, or find a new location -- quickly.

Going out of business, as she saw it, wasn’t an option. The livelihoods of 12 people were at stake -- and right before Christmas. They had been together for almost 19 years. They had developed friendships. In Ursula’s eyes, they were as good as family.

“How would you like to be told ... you have to be out of here in less than three weeks because Christmas is coming,” she asked when she told me this story recently.

At the Christmas party she later held in her home, Ursula was feeling broken-hearted, but she still didn’t have the heart to tell everyone else what she was facing.

Raised Roman Catholic, she believes in God, but she didn’t simply say some prayers and sit on her hands. “I believe you have to believe in yourself in order to get things done,” she says. Her husband Bruno encouraged her not to give up and kept her hopeful of finding a place to relocate.

They looked day and night for a long time without success. It’s not easy, she explained to me, for a salon to pick up and move. Most retail spaces aren’t designed or equipped to accommodate a salon. It usually takes major, expensive construction to ready a building for that.

“I had many, many sleepless nights,” Ursula says. “I was devastated.”

Then she and Bruno got wind of a building for sale in Old World Village on Center Avenue, and they began negotiations with its owner. With the clock steadily ticking ever closer to Christmas, they made their best offer.

Someone tried to trump their offer, but in the end they prevailed. “Thank God, it did go through,” Ursula says. She and her husband refinanced their home to buy the building and pay for the extensive remodeling it would take to create a salon. When the deal was done, she finally told the staff.

“Listen,” she told them, “I have another building. We’re going to move into it. It’s not going to be easy, but if we all stick together we can do it.” She knew each one of the staff would have to decide whether to come with her.

“I’m very grateful and very fortunate to have the people I have,” she says. “Everybody came. I didn’t lose anybody. I gained two people.” Which means she longer has her own station, but that just makes her laugh.

The move, like she promised, wasn’t easy. She engaged an attorney, costly but necessary, to prolong the time she had to move from the building on Warner Avenue. The construction at the new building simply couldn’t be completed in less than a month. Bruno and the staff helped with the labor of the move and remodeling. Everyone pitched in; clients were patient and loyal.

Quite a few people have asked, “What were you thinking?” Mortgaging her home, saving her business by financially nearly starting over again from scratch. People tell her, at her age, she should have retired and relaxed.

But she always knew, putting 12 people out on the street on the eve of Christmas was not something she could have ever lived with. Ursula’s no grinch.

Something good, she believes, came out of something very bad. “It’s like we had a guardian angel,” she says.

Recently a client compared her experience to that of Joseph as recounted in the 37th chapter of Genesis, the first book of Moses. Out of jealously, Joseph’s brothers trapped him in a well and sold him into slavery. But Joseph was destined to became a very powerful man in Egypt, who -- when famine hit -- was able to save his family from starvation. Something exceedingly good came out of something very bad.

Joseph told his brothers, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done.”

Ursula says, “I was really very angry in the beginning but, now, [I think] it was probably a blessing in disguise because we are happy here. No one can tell us to leave here. It’s ours now. We are here to stay.” Even if, in its new building, the Upstairs Salon is now downstairs, which some of its clients actually appreciate.

This year, for Ursula and her staff, Christmas will be exactly what it’s supposed to be -- merry and bright.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.

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