Guest post by Jesyka Pullins, TUBC student at our Glendale Heights campus.
Monday April 6th was the first time I volunteered to help out at a fashion show for Tricoci University. The event was for disabled children. It was held at Alta Villa Banquets in Addison. Personally I have never been there before but I know people who have and they said it was nice. So when I first showed up out front there were white light posts all throughout the parking lot. The entrance has pillars and was white with a subtle red color.
When I first walked inside Alta Villa Banquets what caught my eye were the chandeliers on the ceiling all down the hallways and one huge chandelier in the middle of the entrance. There was also a beautiful hand painted mural of different places is Italy. Another thing that stood out to me was all of the mirrors lining the walls in the hallways; which is heaven to a cosmetologist, but that wasn’t all. They also had a very elegant main hall which for today was being used for a fashion show. Before the show started there was an auction being held. They had a bunch of things like jewelry, wine, clothes, toys, and many more stands.
One of the more popular stands was the photo booth. It was set up right in the main room with the show. They had props you could use while taking the pictures such as hats, mustaches, glasses, and even a microphone. People were having a blast in there. After taking a look around the place, we headed back to the “bridal suites” where we all setup. There was about 12-15 girls that came with to help out. What we were assigned to do was to style the girls hair and do their makeup. There were all different ages of models from little girls to middle-aged women, some older women, and surprisingly there were a couple dogs and a baby boy. It started out kind of slow with only a couple of girls doing hair and makeup. Then it picked up and every girl was doing some sort of up-do. For the most part we curled everyone’s hair but every girl had a different style.
There was one little girl who we did a twisted side ponytail and then curled the ends. Another who we curled the whole head a then pulled it half up. And then one, we took a little hair from the sides and twisted them around the head and pinned it kind of making a flower shape. We even had a very small maybe 2 years old little boy named Leonardo, who we attempted to spike what hair he had on top of his head, but that’s just naming a few.
The room we were in was coincidently located by the women’s bathroom with a constant flow of girls walking past. There was one instance where, these girls were passing by our room saw what we were doing and they instantly stopped and stared at us. Welcomingly, we asked them if they wanted their hair and makeup done for fun, and of course they said yes. So we all had another project to work on to keep us busy. Sadly, those were the last girls that we had for the day, which brought us to around one o’clock. All in all, I feel we had a very fun time doing this for these children. The location was beautiful, the people were extremely friendly, we were more than happy to help out for this event and I am in hopes of doing something like this again in the future.