By Andy Furman
NKyTribune reporter
If you think you, have it rough – well, this will certainly make you feel just a little bit better. She has been a hairdresser for 34 years and works six-days-a-week. She is married. She is a homemaker. And she is also a mom – with eight kids.
How does she do it?
“I wake up each day and pray, seriously,” Jenny Riesenberg Bent told the Northern Kentucky Tribune. “And I attend daily mass – either at St. Pius, Mother of God Church or Thomas More University.”
Her schedule changes daily – but her work load remains the same. Monday its 1:30-6:30 p.m.; Tuesday, 7:30 a.m. to noon; Wednesday she will give her dad a shower before her workday starts – then it is a 3-8 p.m. shift. Thursday, she works at The Christian Store on Dixie Highway; Friday it is a 9-3 p.m. shift and Saturday she has a personal client.
Throw in cooking, shopping, driving kids to and from school and, ugh, laundry well, it is much. Too much for some – not for Jenny Riesenberg.
Hair styling wasn’t always top of mind for her. The St. Pius and Notre Dame Academy grad attended Northern Kentucky University for about a year and-a-half.
“I was a really good student,” she said, “And I always wanted to go to the University of Kentucky.”
She did after her stint as a Norse – and said it was just a miserable experience.
“I had a dream one night and hair school was it,” she admitted. “I told a friend to take me home (from Lexington). She was worried about me. She even asked if I was pregnant.”
Not yet, anyway.
She returned to Northern Kentucky to answer a dream – and become a hairstylist.
“My dad said he told me to do this for years,” Jenny said. “I don’t remember hearing him saying that.”
Vogue College of Hair Design formerly of Highland Heights was her next stop, and it was home for about a year-and-a-half or the 1,800 hours required for graduation.
That graduation was in December, 1988.
Now to work – something Riesenberg has never stopped doing.
“I wanted to work at McAlpin’s in the Crestview Mall, because it seemed like every woman in Northern Kentucky got their hair done there,” she said.
She called – make that hounded – the manager and was hired. “She told me she never had anyone call as much, every week,” Riesenberg said.
And at the early stage of her career, she was told there are two types of hairstylists: Those who cut hair and like people; and those who like people and can’t cut hair.
“I wanted both – like people and cut hair,” she said.
Seven years was the McAlpin’s run which has led her to her present-day home – Salon Concepts; which has since been sold to Salon Lofts.
Again, the result of a dream. “I just knew this was the place for me.”
Jenny Riesenberg says she could be a stand-up comic with all the stories her family has supplied over the years. But she chooses to keep those private.
When asked how she and her hubby John can afford eight kids, she quickly snaps: “We can’t; but we make it happen.”
She says he feeds the body – and she feeds the soul.