Jenny Bluestein, a onetime nurse who became a prominent hair stylist and TV personality in St. Louis and who then opened her cancer battle to the public, died April 27 at 60 of a pulmonary embolism.
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“Our viewers loved her,” said Jennifer Blome, KSDK-TV news anchorwoman. “She took great pleasure in helping people be what they wanted to be.”
During the late 1980s and 1990s, the salon she operated with her husband, Markus, became a fashionable locale in St. Louis. Celebrity clients included President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper Gore, TV personality Sally Jesse-Raphael, and singer Patti LaBelle.
“She was sort of fabulous, before fabulous was in,” said Steven Woolf, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis artistic director.
At the time, her hair cutting and makeup work was featured on a local TV program, “Monday Make-Over.” A year after her husband died in 1994, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The TV station broadcast her surgery and later reconstruction.
Bluestein graduated from the Jewish Hospital School of Nursing and worked as at what is now Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. She left the salon business in 2000 and went back to nursing in the ICU at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. She served on the Board of Directors of AIDS Foundation St. Louis, where she received the foundation’s Humanity Award.
The Eulogizer highlights the life accomplishments of famous and not-so-famous Jews who have passed away recently. Write to the Eulogizer at eulogizer@jta.org. Follow the Eulogizer on Twitter @TheEulogizer
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