Body modifications factor less in job search
May 8th
Nightmare Studios is one of many tattoo parlors that serves the Reno area. Photo by Casey O'Lear
Employees at Best Buy on Virginia Street weave through aisles of computers and electronic devices, stopping to interact with customers. One has a large tattoo on her chest, visible over the top of her blue work shirt. A manager has a full sleeve of tattoos. Another customer specialist has stretched earlobes with the Best Buy logo adorning his gauges.
Nineteen-year-old Cameron Carewicz had custom-made gauges with the logo inside for his stretched ears to be more work-appropriate, he said. He stretched his ears when he was in eighth grade without worrying about being able to find a job, though he now says he probably should have had more concern before modifying his body.
“It was hard looking for a job, to be completely honest,” he said. “The rule was before I got hired that gauges had to be below the size of a dime. Mine already surpassed that, so they just bent the rules. I am thankful for Best Buy that they hired me.”
Because many more young people have body modifications now than in previous decades, employers have adjusted their policies to be more lenient about the modifications. According to a 2008 Harris Interactive poll, one in five people from the western United States has a tattoo. Four in 10 members of the Millennium Generation — American teenagers and young adults entering adulthood around the time of the new millennium — had a tattoo by 2008, according to a Pew Research survey.
Ron Rash, a tattoo artist at Aces Tattoo, said younger people often enter the shop without worrying about the limitations they may face from potential employers.
“We get a lot of young people who seem to not care at all,” he said. “We kind of care for them. Sometimes we have to talk an 18-year-old out of getting their first tattoo on their hands or neck.”
Years ago, tattoo parlors and piercing studios were exclusive hangouts for all manner of riffraff. Today, everyone from doctors and lawyers to university professors and students line up for one of Reno’s numerous tattoo artists and piercers to work on their body art.
While tattoos and piercings were previously associated with prisoners and members of the military, they have gained a more mainstream acceptance that is reflected in their presence in the workplace.
One of Carewicz’s managers at Best Buy, Rob Nelson, proudly touts his gauges as an example of the business’ open-minded attitude toward employee body modification.
“We have leaders with visible tattoos and piercings,” Nelson said. “We live in a world where people express themselves more. A lot of places make people cover up their tattoos, but we choose not to.”
A University of Nevada, Reno student shows off the tattoo she is able to keep covered while working at Babies "R" Us. Photo by Casey O'Lear
Since so many potential employees have modified their bodies, businesses have to make accommodations in their workplace policies.
“Employers don’t have much of a choice,” Rash said. “A lot of the younger population is getting these things done. I tattooed myself for the first time at 14 and got my first professional tattoo at 16. When I got tattooed, it was still much more taboo. I think my age group was a turning point. I think it’s due in part to a popularization of alternative lifestyles in the media. It’s no longer images of prisoners and members of the military — kids are seeing their idols with tattoos. That’s what’s changed. If something is around long enough, people will get used to it.”
Angela Watson, a piercer and owner of Black Hole Body Piercing, said the shop’s client base ranges in age from 15 to 70, and therefore spans a wide variety of professions. She also said the shift in social acceptance of visible body modifications is generational.
“People have grown up with them,” she said. “The next generation will probably have no problem because they grew up with them. As piercings are around more, more generations will be exposed to body modification in general. Stores are popping up in malls. There are more piercing and tattoo studios now than there ever have been in history, and we’re all still open, so it must be more accepted by the public.”
Certain industries, such as those involved in the arts or in lower paying retail positions, are generally seen as more accepting of body modification. Black Hole recommends checking store policies before getting a piercing.
“Most of the time, if they mention work, we tell them to check the employee handbook,” Watson said. “Most of the time, the handbook will specifically mention body modification. If it doesn’t say you can’t have them, then you probably can. It’s usually the preference of the employer and whether the employer happens to like that type of adornment.”
Kindal Sherbourne, a 20-year-old busboy, chose to tattoo her shoulder rather than her entire arm as a precaution, but said that opinions have changed toward body modification.
“Back in the day, things were looked on differently,” she said.
Ryan Adkins, a 22-year-old Career College of Northern Nevada student, said that he plans to work with children in the future and was therefore conscious of the location of his tattoos.
“I like the way they look, but, at the same time, I try to be cautious,” he said. “I want to help kids and be a role model, so I can say, ‘You can have piercings and tattoos, and it doesn’t make you a bad person.’ I don’t think it’s a bad thing as long as the tattoo itself isn’t disrespectful. You have to be smart about what you get — don’t get a penis on your neck.”
Although visible body modification has become more accepted in some work environments, it remains a taboo in others.
“My son went on a field trip to the courthouse, and the judge basically told the whole class that tattoos are for criminals,” Rash said. “He said this to my son, who gets his food and shelter from his dad, who does tattoos. It’s still not accepted completely.”
However, many think that it is only a matter of years before tattoos, piercings and other body modifications are a non-issue for employers who have grown up around the form of artistic expression.
Circus artist shares her view from above
Feb 23rd
Anastasia Bobadilla practices walking on peg stilts, traditionally used in the circus, in the snow. Photo by Casey O'Lear
Decked out in a knee-length green corduroy coat over purple flared pants, Anastasia Bobadilla looks every bit the part of a Burning Man artist.
“I’ve always been a performer,” she said. “I love the circus. I’ve always wanted to run away with the circus.”
Bobadilla, a full time massage therapist, walks on stilts and does aerial silk dance in her free time. She is one of the founding members of Reno Stiltwalkers, a loosely organized group of about 15 local stilters. Members of the group, including Bobadilla, have been performing around town for years and are versed in many types of circus art, including fire spinning, aerial acrobatics and stilt walking.
“There’s a lot of crossover,” Bobadilla said. “Since I was already performing with a group in town doing fire stuff, aerial stuff, they were like, ‘Well, if you’re on stilts now, we’ll put you in the show on stilts.’”
Bobadilla has been involved in performance art all her life. As a child, she studied gymnastics. In high school and college, she explored theater and earned a degree in theater from the University of California, Davis. During her college years, Bobadilla spent a year studying abroad in Chile, where she discovered a thriving circus community.
“There’s a huge circus community in South America,” she said. “People were offering classes in their backyards. You could do stilt walking or flying trapeze everywhere. That got me initially interested in circus because there was so much down there.”
After graduating from college, Bobadilla became more involved in physical performance, finding circus culture particularly appealing.
“It’s not traditional fine art that you would learn in school academically,” she said. “Circus is where all the freaks are. Circus people are like no other people. They live and breathe their art, and they do things that nobody else can do. They are elegant and beautiful and crazy and weird. You can do anything in the circus. You can be anyone. You can be a bearded lady and people love you. I dig that a lot.”
With a background in gymnastics and acrobatics, Bobadilla felt at home the first time she climbed onto a pair of stilts five years ago.
“I basically just bought myself a pair of stilts off eBay,” she said. “It’s not as hard as it might seem, but you have to have the guts to get on the first time.”
Bobadilla, now 32 years old and married, said the main difficulty of walking on stilts is psychological.
“I got over my fear when I was walking on stilts for the first time and I tripped in the way that I might trip on my feet,” she said. “My instant response was to catch myself the way I would do on my feet. It was no big deal. Once I realized that my body knew what to do because I’ve been walking around on my feet for so many years, it’s just getting over that psychological hurdle.”
Jake Peck, a 27-year-old art major at Truckee Meadows Community College, performed with Bobadilla on aerial silks and has also been stilting for about five years.
“Being 6-foot-2, I just had to be taller,” he said. “It has a fun circus vibe that I’m all about.”
A local performance artist, A_delle, has performed with Bobadilla for years and has mastered many types of performance art herself. She specializes in fire spinning.
“I used to be afraid of fire,” she said. “I decided to conquer my fear and started working with fire. The situation is different from dancers on stage. I guess they could fall off the stage, but we could break our necks or burn ourselves, which has happened. There’s an element of danger that people are drawn to.”
Once she mastered the art of stilt walking, Bobadilla began incorporating the new talent into performances she was doing with other artists around town. With a group called Axiom Elements Productions run by A_delle, Bobadilla has been hired to stilt for various events and parties, traveling to Texas, California and the Caribbean to perform.
“People hire us for ambient entertainment because it makes the party look more interesting because there’s more levels of people,” she said. “We’ve gotten hired by the Grand Sierra many times for just hanging out in the crowd and looking interesting and walking tall and hoping not to fall in the pool. We’ve been hired a lot by the casinos. A lot of meet-and-greet events where they want us to stand at the door and welcome people coming in because it’s more interesting than somebody standing on their feet.”
A_delle said she particularly enjoys the reactions her group of performers gets from audiences.
“People are just amazed — they can’t get enough,” she said. “People are amazed, freaked out and giddy. They act like children. We performed at an assisted living facility once, and the old people were really amazed. It was cute. The defibrillators were probably ticking overtime.”
One performance that all of the Reno Stiltwalkers attend annually is Burning Man. The weeklong desert art festival is home to a special area just for circus performers called the Red Nose District, which includes a bar that can only be reached on stilts.
“One thing they have at Burning Man is a parade called Critical Stilts, where they get all the stilt walkers together and parade through town,” Bobadilla said. “You get people on ten-feet tall stilts and on jumping stilts and doing tricks on stilts. That’s a fun thing to be a part of.”
She has been attending Burning Man for the past eight years. Last year, Axiom Elements was hired to perform in the Great Circle, a main stage area at the festival.
“We performed on stilts with fire at Burning Man,” Bobadilla said. “One of our performers has this huge fire whip. He’s already probably six feet tall, and then he has three-foot stilts and this huge fire whip that he whips out at the audience and it cracks and blows fire. Pretty cool.”
Bobadilla feels that the creativity encouraged at Burning Man has trickled down into the surrounding communities.
“I feel like there’s a lot of support for art because of Burning Man,” she said. “Not only art, but out-of-the-box art and fringe art, circus art.”
Bobadilla said that circus in general has become more popular and accessible to more people in recent years.
“It’s more trendy now,” she said. “You hear about it more, you see it more. I think, because of that, we’ve gained more opportunities. Every year it seems like it’s easier and easier to find opportunities to perform. Maybe 30 or 40 years ago, if you were going to be doing anything in the circus, it was because you either grew up in a circus family and you started when you were two, or you ran away from home and you literally ran away with the circus. Now that this trend has happened, there are circus schools. I can be a full time massage therapist and do circus on the side.”
Bobadilla has big plans for the future. In addition to continuing to teach classes in aerial silks and acroyoga, Bobadilla hopes to spend more time performing and eventually put together a full-length, ticketed show.
“I’m really interested in putting on a show that’s really interesting music and all physical performance,” she said. “No character development or lines or words, but more movements and visuals and acrobatics and levels and colors.”
Drywall Stilts: Drywall stilts make it possible for the stilter to stand still or walk. They are heavier than other stilts and have a sturdy foot on the bottom.
Peg Stilts: Peg stilts are the most traditionally used circus-style of stilts. They are slimmer and more lightweight than other types of stilts.
Spring Stilts: Spring stilts are also considered “jumping” stilts. They are spring-loaded and allow the stilter to jump or to do acrobatic tricks.
Finals Week 2010
Dec 10th
Final week marks the end of the fall 2010 semester—a semester that many students said was among the hardest of their college career.
“This last week is kind of hard because you have all these tests put onto you, and you’re so ready to just be done,” said Zachary Andrews, a 20-year-old advertising major. “Before the tests are there, you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m in the Christmas mood now, ever since Thanksgiving.’ I usually took four classes, but in order for me to graduate in four to five years, I need to step up the credits. It’s my first semester completing five credits successfully.”
For some freshman, making the transition into college life has been easy, as evidenced by final exams.
“I already had finals before Dead Day,” said Robert Maktenieks, an 18-year-old undecided major. “I don’t know why my teacher did that. So, that was pretty easy. Now I have a break, and all of the rest of my finals are on Monday, so I have the whole weekend to study. It’s pretty cool.”
Before the semester come to a close, students are getting together to do last-minute studying before taking exams.
“It takes a lot of time,” Andrews said. “I studied all night two nights ago. So far I’ve only had biology, and I had my art final, which was a project. But today I have my French final, so I’m reviewing for that. I’m kind of tired from the night before so I’m kind of slacking. My bio final is pretty hard, but since I studied hours on end for it, I was pretty prepared.”
Check out an audio slideshow here.
Reno hotspots thrive at night
Dec 7th
Nightly at 8 p.m., shops and restaurants around the nation close their doors. Citizens retreat into their homes, regretting not taking the chance to pick up groceries or order a pizza before businesses closed for the night. But not in Reno.
With a downtown area full of casinos, clubs and bars open late, Reno has gained a reputation for being a 24-hour city.
While 24-hour businesses face problems such as complaints from neighbors and high costs of remaining open when fewer customers come in, many agree that the ends justify the means.
“If they find it worthwhile, they’ll do it,” said Elliott Parker, chair of the economics department at the University of Nevada, Reno. “Bars tend to find it worthwhile.”
Bars are not the only businesses open 24 hours a day — many other restaurants and shops stay open late to cater to customers of all ages. One such business is the Gold ‘N Silver Inn, a popular place for students to eat after a wild night out on the town, as it is always open.
“We’re busy 24 hours,” said Renate Harding, Gold ‘N Silver manager. “We’re not as busy at 12 as we are at noon, but we’re still really doing good business. Lots of people come here at night, mainly young people from the university who are studying all night.”
Pie-Face Pizza Co. has already gained lots of attention for marketing itself as a new late-night restaurant and hangout for young people, though it is a relatively new business to downtown Reno. The restaurant is open as late as 6 a.m. during the weekends.
Pie-Face co-owner Trevor Leppek said that the restaurant gets a lot of business from people in the service industry who get off work late at night.
“The staff from the Freight House district usually comes over here all together after their shifts are over,” he said. “Business is really steady on the weekends. We usually have a line going toward the door.”
Reno’s notoriety as a 24-hour hotspot stems in part from the fact that businesses in the United States are typically open later than businesses in other countries, Parker said. Many shops close at about 9 p.m., and bars in many states stay open past midnight, which is not the case in other countries.
“It’s because of government restrictions,” he said. “We tend to not regulate as much. Most states enforce a 2 a.m. closing time for bars, but we don’t do that.”
While some businesses thrive at night, others have to cut back hours because of a suffering economy, Parker said.
“Businesses are having to cut corners,” he said. “It’s expensive to stay open 24 hours. Even if you have a smaller staff, you still have to pay the lighting bill and you have to have a staff even if there are no customers. It’s not uncommon for businesses to shut down or close earlier during a severe recession.”
Another problematic aspect of a 24-hour town is the excitement downtown that continues all night, much to the chagrin of many local residents.
Reno City Councilman Dave Aiazzi said that he is glad Reno is seen as a 24-hour city, despite problems that are associated with the downtown area’s unconventional hours.
“There are plenty of places that are open downtown that get no complaints, and there are some that get the majority of the complaints,” he said. “I don’t think it’s the 24-hour nature, per say, that causes the complaints but the type of activity that the business puts up with.”
Aiazzi said the city council encourages businesses to stay open later and does not wish to make them close early.
“A lot of people are out there trying to say that the city’s trying to shut them down, and that’s absolutely not the truth,” he said. “I’d love for everyone to stay open and stay open 24 hours. They’ve got to regulate their own behavior. All the taxpayers in Reno shouldn’t be putting out security in the form of a police department for one or two businesses downtown.”
Aiazzi said that one of the Reno City Council’s main plans to curb noise and other complaints from residents in the downtown area is to charge businesses a fine for after-hours police calls.
“If you stay open past two o’clock and you get a lot of police calls, you get a fine, so you might find it’s cheaper to close at two o’clock,” he said. “We did the same thing with false alarms. If you had a lot of false alarms, we’re going to charge you for it. If you have an alarm, you should know how to work it. If you own a bar, you should know how to work a bar.”
Chris Favata, a 21-year-old secondary education major, said he goes to Pie-Face Pizza Co. with his friends and likes seeing downtown businesses open late for students.
“There aren’t enough places open late in this town — casinos and bars notwithstanding,” he said. “Many of us college students stay up late and would love to have good dining options late at night, especially ones with the kind of atmosphere they have. I don’t really know how much business Pie-Face is doing at 3 a.m., but I hope it’s working out for them.”
Veteran’s Day 2010
Nov 10th
Members of Delta Sigma Pi fraternity passed out buddy poppies in front of the Joe Crowley Student Union in honor of Veteran’s Day.