FOOD FOR THOUGHT Break Your Own Rules
Have you ever done something spur-of-the-moment, out of your routine, and it turned out to be the best thing you ever did? That happened to me exactly 40 years ago on Nov. 11, 1983. First, the back story. It was a Friday night, and at the time, I was a hairstylist working in a high-end hair salon called Papillons in Studio City, California, near a lot of studios like Universal, CBS, and Warner Bros. Many TV celebrities like Valerie Bertinelli, Michael J. Fox, and Loni Anderson, to name a few, came to get their hair cut, colored, and styled at Papillons. Those three weren’t my clients, but I had a few celebrity clients and behind- the-scenes people of my own like Dusty Springfield, Sandahl Bergman (from “Conan the Barbarian”), and Patricia Kingsley, the publicist for Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg. As a rule, I never went out on Friday nights because Saturdays were my busiest, most profitable day of the week. I wanted to get a good night’s sleep and be my best for Saturday. But a friend of mine named Alan from my teen years moved back to Los Angeles from New York after a relationship breakup, and he wanted to meet up with me and another mutual friend, and that was the night that worked for all of us to get together. I broke my rule of never going out on a Friday night. I’m all about having fun, and this was an exception to just going out with the usual group; I was seeing someone I hadn’t seen in a long time. Plus, the early ‘80s was the height of the disco craze, and I was a disco queen. This particular night, we decided to go to one of the best discos, Le Hot Club. People dressed up to go there, the DJ spun great songs, and it was the place to play
the game of the ‘80s: backgammon. Alan and I were sitting at the bar having a drink waiting for our other friend to join us. We started talking about who our “types” were for
40 years later, babysitting our granddaughter in 2023
relationships, then about looks. “Who in here looks like your type?” he asked me. I looked around the room and pointed to the handsome man across the bar talking to another guy. “That guy,” I said. After chatting with Alan for a few moments about why the guy across the way looked like my type, he said, “You should go ask him to dance.” I didn’t want to ask that guy or any guy to dance. What if they said no? I’d be embarrassed. But after a little more encouragement, I asked the guy across the way if he’d like to dance with me. That guy turned out to be Michael Rozbruch. What happened next is history because we hit it off and started dating, and Michael proposed to me eleven months later. As a side note, after dancing, we started talking, and Michael told me he was a “cost accountant.” It sounded impressive, even though I had no idea what a cost accountant was. Many people who know us know this story, but it feels magical to me that Nov. 11, 2023, is the anniversary of the night I met Michael exactly 40 years ago. I recently learned that the number 11 is a magical number, and we met on 11/11, so that’s a double blessing. If Rod Serling from “The Twilight Zone” came up to me on that night and said, “You will marry this man, and exactly 40 years from now, you both will be babysitting your granddaughter while your daughter goes on a babymoon with her husband,” I would have never believed it. And it all happened because I broke my own rule. I do believe Michael and I were meant to be, so maybe I would have met him another way, but maybe I wouldn’t have either. The point is that it’s good to have exceptions to your own rules. It’s good to break away from your routines and do things differently. That leads me back to you: What rule have you broken that has made an impact in your life for the better? It’s something to think about. And to Michael, I say, “Happy anniversary! It’s been an incredible, interesting, certainly never boring, wonderful 40 years!” –Roslyn Rozbruch
Le Hot Club, 1983
2 • www.rozstrategies.com
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