Shaves head to
show daughters beauty's not skin deep
·
By Kaitlin
McCallum
·
February
15, 2011
A hair and
makeup artist knows about beauty and a mother who has led two gorgeous daughters
through years of pageants, even more so. But just to make sure her girls didn’t
get the wrong idea, Lisa DiRenzo shaved her head.
“You’re worth
more than your long hair and your external beauty,” DiRenzo said Monday night at
Zinc Salon, where she organized “Notice Your Self Worth
Expose,” a fundraiser for the Notice Family Foundation and the Petit Family
Foundation.
In addition to
raising money, the evening was meant to raise awareness of domestic violence,
victims’ rights and what the community can do to help.
DiRenzo, once a
victim herself, wanted to tell her daughters and other young women, that
realizing their self-worth can save them from thinking they have to endure
abuse.
DiRenzo works at
Zinc Salon in Unionville and had always been concerned about domestic violence
awareness. When she heard the story of Tiana Notice, a young woman murdered two
years ago in
The effort began
at Zinc, to which DiRenzo brought musicians from among her family and friends
and an ice sculpture donated by LaSalle Market and Deli and carved by Ed
Jarrett. It spilled over into Caffeine’s Café, just next door, which provided
catering and extra space for a silent auction. Yume and George’s Pizza and
Restaurant also provided some food for the event and many other local businesses
contributed to a silent auction benefitting the two
foundations.
Tiana Notice’s
parents, Alvin Notice and Kathy Lewis, spoke Monday night, of their daughter and
the cause they’ve taken up since they lost her.
“We’re her
voice, we’re here standing for her,” Lewis said, “and we want to make sure what
happened to her doesn’t happen to anyone else’s child.”
Alvin Notice,
who began the Notice Family Foundation just after Tiana’s death in 2009, has
been actively fighting for domestic violence victims, most recently advocating
for GPS tracking for offenders. The foundation installs security cameras in the
homes of domestic violence victims so they will have proof restraining and
protective orders have been violated. Notice is currently suing the town of
Dr. William
Petit also spoke Monday night about victims’ rights. He told the crowd about
logging onto the Connecticut Coalition of Domestic Violence website one day in
September and seeing that 1,125 victims had been served that day. That, he said,
would be seven or eight people per town and beyond that, 73 percent of domestic
violence goes unreported. Domestic violence, he said, is all around
us.
“We have a
victims’ rights law but it doesn’t have a lot of teeth,” Petit said. “We have
restraining and protective orders but they don’t have a lot of teeth. There
needs to be a different way to go about it.”
What the
community can do, Petit said, is support local women’s shelters like the
And then there’s
DiRenzo’s hair. The strength to get out of a bad situation or to not end up in
one is found in knowing you’re worth something, DiRenzo said. And no matter how
you look, DiRenzo told daughters Que, 19, and Chelsea, 22, the beauty’s on the
inside.
So you may see
the 45-year-old stylist at Zinc in Unionville, showing off the courage to go
without hair and the courage to notice her self-worth.
http://farmington.patch.com/articles/stylist-raises-funds-awareness-of-domestic-violence#