As Barbara Paget stood Tuesday at Femmes Day Spa in Highland Park, 20 years after salons around the nation began to embrace Cancer Survivor Beauty and Support Day at her urging, her mind drifted back to a frigid winter night and a young woman whose fight against cancer Paget will always remember.
Paget’s eyes welled with emotion as she recalled how the woman explained her presence at the event, then in its early days, by telling other participants, “Let’s just say I spent my 21st birthday in the hospital.”
“I fell in love with that child that day,” Paget said. “I visited her in the hospital. I visited her in her home. I went until she passed away.”
Many vivid memories of meeting people while they battle one of humanity’s worst diseases power Paget in her one-woman mission, which begins after the turn of each New Year. She calls hundreds of salons around the United States — and some in Mexico and Canada — to affirm their commitments to the event on the first Tuesday of June.
From Alaska to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, beauty schools, chains like Great Clips and small salon and spa businesses participate in the day each year.
“People came, they stayed and they started exchanging phone numbers,” Paget said. “One woman brought another woman the next year. She was on a walker. I thought, ‘This is exactly what I wanted it to be,’ that you get support from each other, and from the places where you go.”
It’s more than a passion project for Paget, who at the event’s 20th iteration on Tuesday was once again reminded of the impact that a gesture of kindness and support can have when she reconnected with a pair of longtime attendees.
Joanne Goodman said she looks forward to Cancer Survivor Beauty and Support Day each year. Goodman has battled cancer for many years, she explained, and she is back in the thick of the fight after receiving a lung cancer diagnosis in 2022.
“One of the only things I plan on doing on this day is getting this mani-pedicure,” Goodman said. “It’s so much fun. I think that it’s a wonderful way to respect and honor the people who are battling this terrible disease.”
Goodman said people in Highland Park are very helpful and supportive in her fight of the disease, “But Barbara is very special.”
“Barbara listens with her heart,” Goodman said. “She just gets it.”
Anna Mikulski, the owner of Femmes, has supported the event since its first edition in 2003.
“The special thing is that I see the same people coming back,” Mikulski said. “Plus additional (people), but they were still going with life. I think this is the most rewarding thing, and I’m very happy that I can do it as long as I am here.”
Paget has taken her advocacy for cancer survivors to the federal government, where former U.S. Rep. Bob Dold and current U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Highland Park, have introduced bipartisan proclamations declaring the first Tuesday of June in each year as Cancer Survivor Beauty and Support Day in the United States.
Great Clips locations in Canada’s Ontario province also participate, and Paget won the favor of the chain’s corporate decision-makers years ago, which resulted in every location participating annually. Paul Mitchell Hair and Beauty School locations around the country also take part, as well as salons in the state of Jalisco in Mexico.
Systems Beauty College in Brandon, a city in Canada’s Manitoba province, hosted the event this year while also providing $5 meals to anyone who wanted to support the Canadian Cancer Society, according to the college’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.
June is also Cancer Survivor Month in the United States, and the day Paget propelled to national prominence closely follows National Cancer Survivors Day, which is commemorated each year on the first Sunday of June.
The timing is more of a coincidence than coordination, Paget said, as the event initially took place in December. That brought up another powerful memory, as Paget recalled what one survivor told her during another chilly Cancer Survivor Beauty and Support Day that occurred during a blizzard.
She was trying to zip up one survivor’s coat when the woman told Paget, “You don’t have to button it up.”
“I said, ‘Oh, yes, I do. It’s very cold out,'” Paget said. “(Then the woman) said, ‘If I could make it through what I was put through this year, I can deal with anything.’ I never forgot that.”
Liz Grabscheid first visited Femmes for Cancer Survivor Beauty and Support Day after seeing a flyer in her oncologist’s office, and she loved it so much that she has been a regular at the spa for years now, not just in early June.
“I say, ‘You need to go do this for yourself,'” Grabscheid said. “It brightens your spirit, and it makes you realize how beautiful you can be. Regardless of if you’re bald or you have hair, or if you’ve lost weight, you’re still gorgeous.”
Grabscheid said she, “spreads the word as much as I can” to people she knows with cancer and cancer survivors. When she first began to lose her hair because cancer treatments, Grabscheid said it was a shock, but she soon told her mother and brother to shave it off.
“You realize,” Grabscheid said, “Your hair doesn’t define you. Your nails don’t define you. You define you.”
Now in her 70s, Paget hopes other people will step up to ensure that those who have faced cancer are able to enjoy the special day for years to come. Paget doesn’t know what the future holds, but will continue her work as long as she can.
Regardless, there are reassurances that the day will live on no matter how long Paget is able to keep up her dogged organizing efforts.
She recently met Paul Mitchell Hair and Beauty School co-founder Winn Claybaugh in the western suburbs, days before the event’s 20th edition on Tuesday. Their real-life meeting followed years of her coordinating the event at each of his schools by phone.
” (Claybaugh) dropped his stuff, took me in his arms and said, ‘I love you! Come with me,'” Paget said.
“That’s how I know this is the right thing to do,” she said. “It’s just right. Every single licensed person in the beauty and wellness industry should absolutely take part in this.”
