Ask a New Yorker: Where am I? Where are you? How did I get here? What the hell is going on? Look at you, you look like Edward Scissor-hands.
Shanaz: You’re scaring me Kennedy. We’re at Hayato Salon, a Japanese Salon which I’ve been going to for three years. They do an excellent job on my hair doing this Japanese straightening, so that I can just walk out of the shower and not have to deal with it and its dead straight.
Ask a New Yorker: The salon is based on the idea of styling a specific type of hair; being course and frizzy?
Shanaz: Right. This treatment is actually designed to make Japanese hair shiny but then they figured out by adding heat, the straightening technique was created.
Ask a New Yorker: What an unusual name you have Mrs. Fillmore, not Fillmore which is a lovely last name, but your first name, what’s the history?
Shanaz: Well, my mother is insane. Her name is Marvella. She at one time was an Uberchic. While she was in a moment of insanity she read in a book the name Shanaz, which means “the chosen one”, and decided if she had a girl she would name it Shanaz. Marvella interview: click here
Ask a New Yorker: Where were you born?
Shanaz: I was born in Bogotá, Colombia, which has no direct appeal to anyone in my family. There were good hospitals there. Marv decided to take a plane there, have me, and then three weeks later get on a plane and return to the US .
Ask a New Yorker: ‘We’re not recording this?’ Is it interesting? Is this a Seinfeld moment? Nothing? Something? What’s the story?
Shanaz: As I was driving at seven-thirty this morning, the car light was on and it said the door was open, the passenger door. I was just going down the street to get coffee. So I thought I would close the door when I pulled into the parking lot. The door was not, like, swinging back and forth or anything. Well it did swing right open when I was driving and then quickly shut again. I was thinking to myself, “How lucky am I that nothing fell out, perhaps my purse, my bag”… so I go get my coffee and drive into the city. I go to park the car and put my coat on and I don’t have a coat, because it has fallen outside the door. I called the babysitter and asked her to look on the side of the street in front of the house. It’s gone. My Cole Haan black coat is gone. It’s gone.
Ask a New Yorker: Well, you made a Nyack bus driver very happy, or at least some one in Nyack.
Ask a New Yorker: How long have you lived in New York?
Shanaz: My mother moved to New York when I was around ten. But I’ve been to boarding schools since I was that age. New York has served as home base but I have gone from boarding school in New Jersey, Massachusetts and then another boarding school in Massachusetts to college in Colorado back to New York to live then to Washington D.C, back to New York City to live and now currently living outside of the city.
Ask a New Yorker: How many boarding schools did you get the boot from? I’m kidding. So what’s it like to live in “the burbs”?
Shanaz: I live in Blauvelt, NY which is near a town called Nyack.
Ask a New Yorker: What makes Blauvelt special?
Shanaz: It’s a little bit more interesting than most suburbs because it’s not a train community like Westchester. It has strangely a lot of upper west side expats and it has a Columbia University connection. So it has a more interesting realm to it. Also, it has its little mafia types. Because it is in the parameters for the New York police department and fire department, lots of New York’s finest live here too.
Ask a New Yorker: Reminds me of the movie Copland.
Shanaz: Yes, you’re right. Good movie. I found out about Nyack because a friend of mine’s husband is a college professor at Columbia, which has an annex in the vicinity.
Ask a New Yorker: Do you have a family, husband and kids?
Shanaz: The one I create or the one I came from?
Ask a New Yorker: The one you created.
Shanaz: I married Herbert Fillmore in 2000. He’s a little bit of a psychopath but we love him, nonetheless. That year my daughter Kyra was born, who is a very sweet little girl. Two years later my son Owen came along, who is six, and who is a nut but we love him anyway. In 2004 my last child Logan, a little girl, was born. She is an exact copy of my mother in law, genetically speaking.
Ask a New Yorker: What are your family’s winter activities?
Shanaz: Owen is doing basketball, but we are also skating and skiing. We used to ski in Mountain Creek in New Jersey, which is an hour away. But this year will ski more at Windham in the Catskills which is more of a challenging mountain.
Ask a New Yorker: Shanaz and I have left Hayato and now are having a cocktail at Live Bait. On the way here we ran into Lester Holt, from NBC news, in Madison Square Park.
Shanaz: He was strange looking with the oblong head, since we’re not seeing him on TV.
Ask a New Yorker: He looked a little paler too.
Shanaz: Yes, he’s an Obama. We just created a new catch phrase for the interracial child.
Ask a New Yorker: Last question. What’s your last memory of Live Bait?
Shanaz: Jello shots and probably vomiting to follow.
Ask a New Yorker: O.K on that happy holiday memory, I thank you for your time today and Happy New Year!
