Ask Marianna Spiros and she'll tell you that certain stereotypes of being a part of a Greek family ring true. Her family is so large on her father's side that she has enough cousins to fill a few sports teams. Being that she was the baby of the family, her parents were extremely strict on her more so than her elder sister. The last one that has defined her family the most is that her grandparents and parents own a large Greek restaurant that houses three generations of the family as employees. Marianna can't tell you how or why some of her family members still have a job at the restaurant other than the explanation that "it's because they're family".
Marianna Spiros was born fifteen days before Christmas in the Winter of 1990. She became the youngest of the Spiros family, six years her sister's junior and the last child born to Andreas and Dina. Her father had hoped that with Marianna's conception, there would finally be a male to continue the family legacy but instead the family was blessed with yet another daughter. After trying for another child after Marianna's birth and no male to carry on the Spiros name, the two parents decided to focus their attention and dote on their two daughters instead as well as the family business.
At the point when Marianna's parents had both of their daughters, the two had been Americanized for quite some time. Andreas' parents had come from Greece to New York City before heading west to California. Dina's family had immigrated from Lebanon to California when Dina was a small child. However, the two kept in mind the traditions and values they had been raised with and instilled them upon the girls. First and foremost was that family meant everything. It would be this three word phrase that would later throw a wrench into Marianna's aspirations. The family had high hopes for both of their daughters and stressed the importance of a good education and how important it would be for them in the future. Marianna didn't see school as a place to learn but a place to make friends and refine her social skills. Her older sister did well enough in school to please her parents while being enthralled with the family business. On the other hand, there was Marianna, who often had to be forced to give her work focus and was sent home with letters from teachers saying that she had "potential" but it would be a shame if she wasted it all at the lunch table and passing notes to her friends.
As Marianna approached adolescence, her interests shifted when spending two weeks with her Aunt Mona in her hair salon down in San Diego. She became fascinated with how a simple hair cut and dye job could turn a woman's look around and quickly declared to her family that one day, she wanted to go to beauty school much like her aunt. Unfortunately, that didn't bode well with her parents who chalked it up to a childish fantasy at the time as the young girl was expected to become involved in the family business. Marianna knew her sister showed a certain flare for cooking an an interest in the restaurant and had been naive enough to think that it would satisfy the quota for family involvement in the restaurant. But instead as she approached high school, Marianna was bogged down with tutors whose sole mission were to ensure her admittance into a good college. Her sister's interests were culinary and her parents figured that with Marianna's social interest that she'd be a shoo-in for handling the business side of things. Throughout high school, the teenager begged and pleaded to be able to attend cosmetology school once graduation rolled around but instead found herself applying to every school she could with a reputable business program. There would only be one to accept her: Oklahoma State University.
Marianna will tell you it was four years too long that she spent in what she would constantly refer to as a "stick in the mud hick town". Nevermind that Stillwater was a city that boasted a population of more than forty five thousand residents. Marianna was a California girl at heart and longed for sunny weather and beaches rather than southern heat but she made due. Marianna pledged Pi Beta Phi her freshman year and gained some social standing and guaranteed friends and eventually worked her way up to social chair by her junior year. In 2012, she graduated and returned back to California to both help with the family business and subsequently live with her sister. It took a year but their father finally allowed the girls to spread their own wings and follow their dreams. Chryssa became a business owner with a food truck and Mariana was allowed to go to beauty school as long as she promised to still work at the family restaurant. Within a year, Mari had graduated from Cosmetology school and now works as a hairdresser while maintaining a youtube channel.
