State-Journal.com - One animal at a time

Featured Video:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Photo By State Journal/Hilly Schiffer A dog up for adoption kisses Teresa Masters, a board member at the Franklin County Humane Society and a longtime volunteer there and at L.I.F.E. House for Animals.

Frankfort Faces: Teresa Masters

Photo By State Journal/Hilly Schiffer Teresa Masters, right, gives a manicure to longtime client Cindy Cannon as Frosty Cardwell and Georgena Conn chat at Nails N More.

A woman walked into Nails N More for a haircut a decade or so ago, and as she sat in the powder blue barber’s chair, her voluminous hair started moving on its own.

Nestled inside her locks was a baby possum – she’d brought it to the Frankfort beauty shop because she knew Teresa Masters would find it a home.

Teresa, an avid nature photographer, still has black-and-white glamour shots of the whiskered baby in a photo album. She pulls it out to prove he was adorable.

“My mom said that when I was little, I never wanted dolls,” she said, sitting at her manicurist’s table on an icy February afternoon. “I always picked up the stuffed animals.”

Since then, she’s picked up countless cats and dogs abandoned on the roadside near her home in rural Franklin County. She keeps a cat carrier and food in her car just in case.

One day, she was driving home when she saw a stranded dog. She tried to coax it toward her, but it didn’t work, so she headed home for some dog food. She went back later to see if he’d eaten it.

“Instead, there were three kittens in the same place,” she said. “That’s when I just looked up and said, ‘OK, I give up. This is what I’ll do.’”

Teresa is the newest board member of the Franklin County Humane Society, and a longtime volunteer there and at L.I.F.E. House for Animals. She works as a “cat wrangler” when the Humane Society hosts spay and neuter events.

The house she shares with her husband, Kenneth, is home to cats, dogs and rabbits – she’s even kept baby ducks in a swimming pool inside her house.

Animals sometimes stay at the beauty shop for a few days or weeks. The ladies of Nails N More have fostered a ferret, lizard, baby pigeon, baby rabbit and a hedgehog.

“If you eat two meals at my house, you get spayed or neutered,” she said. “No one ever comes to my house to eat – I have dinner parties and no one comes!”

But Teresa also has a passion for helping women – whether it’s a customer who needs relationship advice or a rape victim in Africa. Three multi-colored bracelets hang from her wrist, strung with beads made from recycled magazines by impoverished women in Uganda.

“I wear them to remind me that I’m part of a bigger picture,” she said. “There are other women somewhere with a different struggle, and that’s important. We’re all intertwined.”

A cork bulletin board hangs next to the front door at Nails N More, with pins holding newspaper clippings and fliers about volunteer opportunities around Frankfort.

“Everybody can make a difference – you can’t change the whole world, but you can make a difference for somebody,” Teresa said. “I think I’m going to save the world one animal at a time.”

She also volunteers with the youth group at Hope Lutheran Church, visits local schools to read to children, and champions God’s Global Barnyard, an initiative to buy farm animals for impoverished people around the world.

Her coworkers work hard for others too. Hairstylist Beverly Raines helps with her son’s Boy Scouts troop, and she sends hair clippings to an organization that weaves them into mats that soak up oil spills.

Sara Nesselrode works with Big Brothers Big Sisters and pushes for a cure to ALS, and Georgena Conn volunteers with Camp Pleasant Church’s clothing bank.

The foursome has worked together at Nails N More since the late ’90s. They merged with another salon for a while, but when the owner wanted to move the shop, the ladies decided to stay on Louisville Road.

“Us four travel as a pack,” Teresa said. “We’re just sisters, we’re family.”

With a space heater buzzing in the corner, the ladies teased each other and laughed away the cold afternoon. As customers trickled in, Georgena and Teresa headed to their workstations to file acrylic nails, and Beverly snipped off split ends.

The foursome vacations at a state park twice a year, renting a cabin and turning off their cell phones. Georgena says someday they’ll go to the nursing home together too.

“We clicked, it just works,” she said. “We’re more family than we are coworkers.”

Watching it all, Bryan Wayman had his own way of putting it.

“They’re all married or have boyfriends,” he said. “But they (the women) are soul mates.”

Teresa is close with her clients too – hairdressers and bartenders hear it all, she says. Her work is professional, she says, but the relationships are personal.

As she files and paints her clients’ nails, they talk about problems at home and health issues. She looks for job openings when they’re out of work.

Sometimes, they just vent their frustrations. She says the most important thing about the shop is lifting people up, making sure they leave happier than when they arrived.

“If you’re having a bad day, and you think that if you go on home you might stab somebody with a fork, come here first,” she said, laughing. “Husbands and kids should really thank us.”

She even paints little girls’ nails for free before their first day of kindergarten or first grade.

“Since I don’t have any kids of my own, I’m a sucker,” she said.

Frosty Cardwell sits in a chair in the waiting area, talking to Teresa and Georgena as they work. He says he comes to the shop to “get educated.”

He used to bring his wife to get her hair done, but she died a few months ago. Teresa says he still comes to visit, and has taken the ladies to his Masonic lodge for dinner.

“Once you’re family,” she says. “You stay family.”

Teresa isn’t a Kentucky native – she lived in Illinois until she was 10 – but she’s now a proud Southerner. A sign hangs in her kitchen that says, “I wasn’t born in the South, but I got here as fast as I could.”

Her clients like to relax with a manicure or pedicure, but Teresa says her “me time” is in the horse barn, shoveling manure. She’s loved riding horses since she was a child, although she’s never owned one.

“When we moved to Kentucky, my dad told us it was where everybody had horses,” she said. “I thought a horse came with the house, but I still don’t have a horse.

“But if somebody wants to leave one on the side of the road, and they know I’m coming – just leave me a rope. I’ll take it home.”

“Frankfort Faces” is a series that highlights people from within the Frankfort and Franklin County community. Each feature follows one of the city’s most unique personalities and includes a story, photos and video, which can be found by clicking the TV icon attached to the story online at state-journal.com.