Coffee + Stranger #7 - Coffee with Northern Hands and Consulting Your Image

Have you ever noticed that the word nude sounds a bit like the word new? Personally, I hadn't given it much thought until my conversation with Stranger #7, Denise Sims, at Blue Dot Cafe in Alameda, CA. Within the first five minutes of sitting down with Denise, I mentioned that a lot of the strangers I've met happened to be "new to San Francisco's Bay Area." Denise gave me an odd look, but obliviously I nattered on until suddenly she interrupted me: "Ohhhh, you said new to the Bay Area! Sorry, I thought you said nude."

Wouldn't that be something? I bet Coffee with a Nude Stranger would probably get a few more hits on the old interwebs. It might be difficult, though, to find a coffee shop that would allow such a project within its walls. Unless, of course, I moved to Vassalboro, Maine and hung out at its Grand View Topless Coffee Shop. Not a bad idea, I guess, although I could do without the controversy and, I'm not joking here, ARSON.

Initial miscommunication aside, Denise and I had a lovely chat. I think we ended up talking for more than an hour. Native to the Bay Area and a mother of two teenagers, Denise described herself as someone who's "pretty good at personality profiles and picking up on visual cues that tell me a lot about a person." When I mentioned early in our conversation that I'm originally from Canada, she remarked that that made sense. "Yes," she said. "I would have guessed that direction."

Surprised by this comment, I responded, "Wow. That's almost intimidating, like you're looking into my soul as we speak."

Denise and I had a good laugh about that. My soul, however, remained weary and suspicious. What other deep, dark secrets could Denise be gleaning from my appearance? Curious, I pressed her to tell me more about my northern visual cues. Was it my accent? My unibrow? My ratty brown shoes with tattered laces, which are pictured on the right?

Denise told me that she did pick up on an accent, but it was more my "demeanor and disposition" that hinted at my homeland. Furthermore, my "color, bone structure, body type, and hands are more typically from that area."

My hands? Who knew? Looking at my hands now, they reveal, well, nothing to my untrained eye. All I see are blisters, bony pokers, and some unusual angles around my knuckles. What am I missing?


Denise, for her part, wasn't going to reveal any trade secrets. When I asked her to elaborate some more on what was particularly Canadian or northernly about me, she responded: "That's a hard question. I don't think I can answer it because it deals with this whole body of knowledge I have and it would be, like, an hour and a half answer. It's very detailed in a way that's not very interesting."

Fair enough.

Which brings me to Denise's line of work. Considering how she described herself above, what would you think she does for a living? Gumshoe? Psychic? Therapist? Well, in a weird kind of way, she's kind of all three wrapped into one. When talking about her work and her clients, Denise had the following to say: "People say, you know, God this is the best thing. It's better than my shrink, it's better than astrology, this is so cool, and I get clothes at the end!"

Seeing as your conventional gumshoe, psychic, and psychiatrist won't give you clothes when they're done working with you, we can confidently strike those off the list of possibilities. Denise, in actuality, is an image consultant. In fact, she has over 30 years of experience "working with thousands and thousands of people, very intimately, sitting in closets and fitting rooms while clients are in their underwear, finding a look that will make them feel great about themselves!" Simply put, you hire Denise to change or update your look and your wardrobe. She even has a spiffy, new website for her business, which you can take a look at here.

I was pretty blown away by the idea of Denise's profession. I guess I've always known that such a job existed, but I'd never given much thought to how it might actually work. What, for example, is the state of mind of people who seek an image consultant? Not to pigeonhole or stereotype, but I picture people who just got divorced or broke up with a significant other and now want to get all sexied up. What better way is there to show an ex that you're TOTALLY over them then by hitting the town with a snazzy new look?

Obviously, I'm over-generalizing and over-simplifying here. Denise did, however, have this to say: "The key to many of my client's visits is some sort of life pivot." She does get a lot of men and women who are recently divorced (see? I'm kind of right!), but there's also lots of people who are facing other big, transformational life experiences. Examples include losing a bunch of weight, taking on a new job that requires a more professional or edgy look, shaking things up because you've moved to a new (not nude) town, or simply because you wake up one day and realize, hey, my clothes are looking a little dated.

Personally, I can see myself falling into this last category somewhere down the line. I hate shopping and if it weren't for kindly (or maybe embarrassed?) girlfriends who took me shopping and friends (and occasionally strangers) who mocked me, I'd still be wearing ties for belts, moccasins, and ill-fitting, thrift-store polyester pants that an old man had likely died in.

As you may have guessed, I used to be quite the high-fashion trendsetter. And as my tattered brown shoes pictured above indicate, now more than ever I'm still quite the high-fashion trendsetter. I'm a fashionista!

Since I'm male and clearly not much of a shopper, I was also curious if Denise's clients fell in step with some of those obvious gender stereotypes. Fifteen years ago, the majority of Denise's clients were men and they were mainly looking to be fitted for suits. Fast forward to the present day and everything's turned on its head: now the majority of Denise's clients are women and the men that she does see are less and less interested in suits. Denise blames the dot.com era and more casual clothing attitudes for this "major cultural shift". "Now you've got all these renegade people who are really good at what they do," she said. "You've got some surfer dude, roller skating, skate boarding guy who's brilliant at what he does, so employers don't care what he's wearing because he's brilliant." As a result, you've got guys in flip flops and long shorts shuffling around the workplace, instead of guys wearing beautifully pressed, Mad Men-esque suits.

Although Denise really enjoys working with males, this shift from mainly men to mainly women may actually turn out to be good for business. Male clients, it turns out, don't refer their friends and coworkers to Denise. "Men," she said, "are looking for any competitive edge they can get, whether it's work or dating, so they don't tell anyone about me." Women, on the other hand, don't begin to think of image consulting in this way. "Women think it's fun and feel great doing it," said Denise. "So they tell everyone about the services they get from me."

Complicated stuff, right? Denise gets to see first hand some of the prevailing ideas our culture has created about self-image and gender identity, which I think is really interesting. Needless to say, there's a lot more to this image consulting gig than first meets the eye. One thing's for sure: it's definitely not as simple as a 1980's dressing room montage.



The Griswold's are looking sharp!

Coffee + Stranger #6 - Coffee with Winky

Stranger #6 had a common woman's name. Think something along the lines of Sarah or Jenny or Mary. But I'm not going to call her by her real name. Instead I'll refer to her as Winky. Like this:

;)

Why Winky? Well, I'll get to that, but first a little background information: I met Winky at the Blue Dot Cafe in Alameda, the small island city next to Oakland. When we met, she had only lived in Alameda for a couple of weeks, coming by the way of small town Wisconsin, college years at SCAD in Savannah, GA, and a post-Katrina New Orleans. At 26, she was the youngest of the strangers to meet with me so far. She had red hair, pale grey-blue eyes, a patriotic bracelet, and a pretty kick ass leather jacket. She was also someone who liked to keep busy: after a few short weeks in Alameda, she was already going to school for psychology, getting a certification in personal fitness training, trying to finish a movie/musical she'd written and filmed that was stuck in post-production (check out the promo here), writing two serial novels, and had joined a barbershop quartet and a softball league.

By comparison, I spent my day today listening to a baseball game on the radio. I might also have sent some emails and eaten a pretty tasty kiwi. And I took a shower. I'm clean as a whistle!

But what about this nickname? Winky. As with all good nicknames, there's a story behind Winky. My retelling of that story goes something like this:

Winky had moved to New Orleans, post-Katrina, for a job. A really good job. A job that could lead to other jobs in a booming industry. This job involved being a "set dresser" for the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Yes, that Benjamin Button - based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, it's the whimsical tale of a man who ages in reverse.

Wow! Big deal, right? We're talking Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, and the director of Forrest Gump here! And, as expected, this set dresser job led to other, similar jobs in the same industry, as apparently New Orleans is quickly becoming an up and coming city in the motion picture industry. Lots of stuff is being filmed and produced there now. It's like L.A.'s baby sister! In addition to Benjamin Button, Winky had a hand in movies such as In the Electric Mist, The Mortician, and a horror film by the name of The Final Destination. Here's the trailer for that last one, which is the latest installment in a pretty successful series of movies:



Winky, for her part, described Final Destination as a movie that "I wouldn't go see." What's more, working on that movie not only made her miserable, but it made her realize that the world of talking pictures might not be for her. She didn't like how the industry treated people and eventually even changed them: "In general," she said, "anybody, even the nicest person, is going to become tainted while working in this industry, and they get more selfish and high strung."

When I asked if she felt "tainted", she replied: "Yeah, I did for awhile, until I saw there was a light at the end of the tunnel."

And what was that light at the end of the tunnel? Quitting the movie business and getting the hell out of New Orleans, a town to which Winky was never enamored. But not before she went temporarily blind in one eye. Seriously. While working on Final Destination, there were a couple of days when things started to get suspiciously blurry in one of Winky's eyes. At first she didn't think much of this fuzziness. She thought, at worst, that maybe she had something stuck in her eyeball - like lint, dust, or a dead gnat. She complained every now and then to her co-workers until, eventually, her boss took notice and forced her to take some time off and see a doctor. A general eye doctor and a retina specialist later, the diagnosis came in: stress related retinal leaking.

Retinal leaking? Gross.

What's more, Winky let it slip that the retinal leaking in her eye might have had something to do with, wait for it, steroids! She slipped that little nugget into the conversation somewhat casually, almost to the point where I nearly missed it, until suddenly I had to interject:

Steroids? Wait. What?

Was there a point in Winky's life where she was going all Barry Bonds? Did she used to be a crazed, softball-mashing machine with muscles on her muscles, anger management issues, and an ever-expanding hat size?

Turns out that Winky was so stressed, busy, and reluctant to take a day off from working on Final Destination that she took steroids to squash a pesky flu bug. The steroids killed that flu bug dead in its tracks, but combined with the stress, likely triggered a little retinal leaking.

Holy shit!

Which leads to the inevitable question: what cures retinal leaking? In Winky's case, an eye patch and two to three weeks of making a conscious effort to relax did the trick. Not taking steroids also probably helped. She still plugged away at Final Destination, but she also forced herself to take her mind off work by going to the beach, playing some volleyball, and joining a pool league.

Pool, however, involves a lot of depth perception, which can be a little tricky when you're pretty much blind in one eye. At the same time, Winky was finding that her eye patch was kind of scratchy and uncomfortable. So while lining up her shots, she would flip up her eye patch and squint and WINK a lot at the balls on the table, much to the amusement of her fellow pool leaguers.

And, voila! Surrounded by blue chalk, green felt, and black balls, Winky was born!

Which brings me to one last point: where did Winky get those steroids? Maybe I'm going to all the wrong doctors, but I've never heard of prescribing steroids for the flu. I've heard of rest, chicken soup, and orange juice, but never steroids. Unfortunately, I failed to ask Winky to clear up this issue, so I'm at a loss.

I like to think that she got them in some shady, back-alley deal. Or maybe some Hollywood star gave them to her. Hollywood stars, after all, are always doing odd, weird, and crazy things. As well as meeting and/or working with stars like Brad Pitt, Peter Sarsgaard, and Mary Steenburgen, Winky did do some work for everyone's favorite Italian Stallion - Sylvester Stallone! If anyone could ever hook you up with muscle juice, I'd think it would be ol' Sly.

How's that for some rampant, potentially libelous speculation on my part? I'll look forward to a letter in the mail from Sly's lawyers. Or maybe, just maybe, Sly himself will come knocking on my door and deliver me a can of fire and brimstone whoop ass.

That will probably look something like this: