the couch across from Tyra Banks on her talk show.
“That first class went great,” he says. “Dads
didn’t know how to braid or detangle hair
properly. I paid for supplies out of pocket,
shared it online, and it went viral overnight.
Soon, we had 10,000 followers and a
sponsorship, which started providing products
for all the classes.”
Joe Cafeo of Canonsburg found Morgese
through his Facebook page and was interested in
replicating the classes here.
“I’ve been a single dad for about two and a half years. When I first saw
Phil’s website, I started thinking, ‘I could do this too.’ I went to YouTube and
started looking at the tutorials and started learning how to do it myself. I tried
cutting my daughter’s hair on my own, and it was criss-crossed and crooked
and her pony tails were crooked.”
Cafeo, a drug and alcohol therapist, says his motivation for starting was
that he “had a little girl and wanted her to feel like everyone else did.”
The five-year-old loves it, he says. “When I take her to school, she always
tells everyone, ‘Hey! My daddy did my hair,’” Cafeo says.
After getting the basics down pat, Cafeo conferred more with Morgese,
who now has a Daytona, Florida, academy for teaching dads to do hair, on
how to set up his own classes. In April, Cafeo held his own class in a donated
space with sponsored products.
It’s a surly bunch, no doubt—there are dads who are bikers, dads with
tattoos and piercings, dads who have big boots and wallet chains. The class
looks more like a support group for professional bouncers than a salon.
But the underlying commonality uniting all of the men is a deep love and
devotion to their daughters.
“When I take
her to school,
she always tells
everyone, ‘Hey!
My daddy did
my hair.’”
“I’ve found that the people who come to me, when it comes to their
daughters, their daughters are everything — and they don’t care about their
personal roles and what people think about them,” Cafeo says.
Morgese, who’s in his early 30s and 6 feet tall himself, says he’s had the
same reaction from all of his students.
“None of these guys are soft, and society teaches us that men do this and
women do that. I still change my own transmission. I can fix anything with
my hands; hair is no different,” he says. “The guys who come through the
class are people who are saying this is what real fathers do—that’s the kind
of support nobody’s going to look down on. It’s about the kid and not caring
what the world thinks. Do you look down on me for folding laundry or
cleaning the house? That’s part of being a man as well. It’s just another tool in
your belt. With the classes, iron sharpens iron. When we get together, we can
create and better our community.”
For more information about Daddy Daughter
Hair Factory, follow it on Facebook at Facebook.
com/daddydaughterhairfactory, and download a
free online manual to learn hairstyling techniques at
daddydaughterhairfactory101.com.
In Canonsburg, contact Joe Cafeo at 412.722.2659 or
by email at [email protected] for
information on upcoming classes. n
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