PROVINCETOWN — Michael Lussier, longtime hair stylist, flower arranger, and former drag queen, is closing up shop.
On the morning of Jan. 8, Lussier made his last arrangement — white flowers for the funeral of one of his clients — at Provincetown Florist, which he ran for 14 years. Less than two weeks earlier, he closed Hair by the Sea in the same building at 281 Commercial St. The salon had been his for 24 years.
“Tomorrow is a crazy day,” he says, reclining in a cutting chair. “The plumber is coming. The mirror people are coming.” He’ll bring home two of the large wall mirrors for memory’s sake.
Lussier says his exit is bittersweet: he’ll miss his clients, but the work has taken a toll on his body. “Whatever I do in my next career, it’s going to be sitting down.”
Hair by the Sea and Provincetown Florist are for sale. But Lussier can’t guarantee that, if sold, the businesses will remain a hair salon and a flower shop. “I hope so,” he says.
Lussier first came to Provincetown for a weekend in 1982. Two of his friends, lesbians, had recommended the place. “They said, ‘It’s very gay. You’ll love it,’ ” he says. He was newly 20 — he came to town for his birthday, March 6 — with $63 in his pocket.
Lussier jokes that he was “the flavor of the month” in those late winter days. “I had blond hair and blue eyes,” he says. “I had a really good time — we’ll put it that way.”
One paramour asked Lussier to live with him in Provincetown. Lussier went home to Blackstone, where he grew up, on a Monday and moved back to Provincetown that Thursday. But when he knocked on the door, the man’s boyfriend answered. “Guess what? That didn’t work,” says Lussier. He decided to stay anyway and got a job working for Dougie Freeman at his West End Salon.
As a young man, before Provincetown, Lussier attempted to join the military. “The recruiting officer kept badgering me,” says Lussier, “asking, ‘Are you gay?’ ” After about 45 minutes, Lussier says, he relented. “I said, ‘Yes, I’m gay. What does that have to do with anything?’ The officer said, ‘There are no gay people in the Navy.’ My smart ass said, ‘That’s not what my brother-in-law said.’ ” The officer pointed Lussier toward a hair salon across the street.
“I was born a hairdresser,” says Lussier. “It’s in my blood.” He says the practice has been in his family for 120 years. Back home, his aunt owned a salon where, as a child, Lussier would take out rollers and sweep clippings from the floor. After high school, he went to Arthur Angelo’s School of Cosmetology and Design in Providence.
In Provincetown, Lussier worked at the West End Salon, Salon 54, Salon Rose, and for five years at his own salon called Before & After at the Crown & Anchor. In 1998, when the Crown burned down in a five-alarm fire that also destroyed Whaler’s Wharf, Lussier lost the salon as well as a clothing store he owned in the building.
“One day you have a clothing store, a hair salon, and a place to do your show, and the next you don’t have anything,” he says. But he kept going. “I’m that type of person. Knock me down and I come up fighting.”
Lussier started Hair by the Sea with no more than what was necessary: “One cutting chair, one manicure station, one pedicure station, and me.” Later, he expanded into the unit next door: “A massage room, a facial room, two nail techs, three cutting chairs, and me.”
He had an overachiever’s midlife crisis. “Instead of buying a sports car when I turned 50, I opened a flower shop,” he says. Lussier worked six days a week, making casket sprays and wedding bouquets, archways and window displays. His shop delivered from Eastham to Provincetown. At the same time, he ran his hair salon full time. “I never had a day off,” he says.
Outside his work at the salon and flower shop, Lussier is a Eucharistic minister at St. Peter the Apostle Church.
Before he bought the units at 281 Commercial St., he met the men who would be his landlords: Mark Birnbaum and Paul Endich. “They were like, ‘We don’t really know you,’ ” says Lussier. “I said, ‘Of course you know me. You walk by me every night. I usually stand out on the street as Marilyn Monroe.’ ”
Lussier’s career as a drag performer began in 1986 when Tiffany Jones, who used to roller skate down Commercial Street in a nun’s outfit, injured an ankle and couldn’t perform as usual at the Crown & Anchor. Staniford Sorrentino, who owned the Crown at the time, tapped the cocktail waiters in the showroom to perform in Tiffany’s stead. Lussier was one of them.
“I sat in the chair, got painted up, and put the wig on,” says Lussier. His Liza Minnelli stole the show that night. In the audience was Lou Paciocco, who ran a revue in Los Angeles called Evening at La Cage. Paciocco flew Lussier to L.A., where he performed for six months as Minnelli and Elvis Presley, singing instead of lip-syncing. When his contract was up, he came home to Provincetown and created his own show: first at the Pied Piper and then at the Crown & Anchor for 12 years, two shows a night. After the 1998 fire, Lussier took the show to the A-House.
In 1995, Lussier was named Miss Gay Massachusetts. A 1997 article in the Boston Phoenix called Lussier the “doyenne of Provincetown female impersonators.”
In 2006, Lussier retired from performing. The setup at the A-House was different than at the Crown. “The dressing room was on the second floor, and the show was on the first floor,” he says. “For costume changes, I’d have to go up and down a flight of stairs. I said I’d had enough.” He’d been performing for 20 years.
“Provincetown has been good to me,” says Lussier. He owns a home, thanks in part to a program for first-time homebuyers he took part in some 22 years ago.
At almost 63, he says, “There’s still room to grow.” Outside of his work, he says, “I don’t know who I am, really. I’ve been married to my businesses for 43 years. I want to find a boyfriend.”
There are other goals, too: “I want to go to the beach,” he says. “I’ve never been on a whale watch!”
