Starting Over
by Allison Adato
photography by William Mercer McLeod
In her office on a seedy fringe of downtown San Francisco, Kathy Miner surrounds herself with angel figurines, fresh orchids and framed inspirational poems. She’s a devotee of spiritual guru Marianne Williamson and describes faith as “going out on a limb and knowing God will grow a tree under you.” Were she not so sincerely giving of herself, she’d be an easy target for mockery.
Like a growing number of nonprofit groups across the country, her company, A Miner Miracle, helps women facing the job market without money to buy interview-appropriate clothing. Clients come from homeless shelters, drug rehab centers and job training programs. They are women like Bianca Gonzalez child at 16 and once believed, “I’m going to be nothing forever.” They often lack self worth and have little idea how to present themselves to a prospective employer because they haven’t worked recently, if ever. Miner gives free makeovers, a haircut, makeup, two outfits and interview tips. In an office lined with clothes (most donated by Koret, a local manufacturer, some by individuals), she takes women making wrenching changes — getting sober, leaving a bad relationship, learning new skills, and leads them through another crucial metamorphosis. Clothes do not make the woman, but they help. “This is the first time,” says Gonzalez, “that everything is going good for me.”
“Kathy believes in miracles,” says a volunteer about Miner, “but also in a strong professional uniform.” Raised in the affluent Brentwood section of Los Angeles, Miner learned the uniform early and peddled it as a corporate dresser and designer in San Francisco in the 1980s. “I had women in the corporate world who didn’t know how to dress or didn’t have time to shop,” says Miner. But when California hit a recession in the early 1990s, she overextended herself in other business ventures. “All of a sudden, things got very tight.” The woman who thrives on transformations is talking about her own. “I had had a certain standard of living, and now I couldn’t even make my rent. But I couldn’t keep chasing money with no emotional fulfillment.”
SHE CAME THROUGH THE DOOR with a stud under her lip and her name tattooed on her ankle. “A friend told me it didn’t hurt,” Bianca Gonzalez, 22, says of the piercing. “She lied.” After two years in group housing for low-income single parents, Gonzalez will soon move her son, six, and daughter, two, into a real home. She once had an apartment, but the boyfriend who paid her rent while she went to school decided to stop. “I was depressed, missed too much school and got kicked out,” she says. It came as a terrible blow for someone who was trying to avoid the traps set by becoming a teenage parent. When she got pregnant at 16, she didn’t tell her father for six months. (She did, however, get prenatal care from a hospital that did not require parental consent for minors.) Gonzalez considered an abortion but “totally freaked out thinking about the pain,” she remembers. “I didn’t even think about the pain of having the baby.” She and the boy’s father, who still sees his son daily, broke up after a year; she later had a daughter with another man, who is no longer in her life. While living on welfare, she earned a certificate to be a medical assistant, which led to an internship that became a paying job at a women’s health clinic. As a result, Gonzalez has never had a formal job interview. “This is my last month on AFDC,” she says. “They’re cutting me off because I’m making too much, $1,300 a month.” She would like to make more money and switch to assisting in pediatrics. A caseworker at the group home suggested Gonzalez look into Miner’s program. During their initial consultation, Miner advises losing the stud: “For five days a week, your face belongs to your employer.” Gonzalez obliges, carefully removing the stud and laying it on the table.
WHAT TELEATHA DAVIS REALLY wanted was a scarf. “Riding the bus, I’d see a woman wearing a scarf,” she says. “It looked so good.” In her 36 years she’s held a string of jobs: as a typist, a video store clerk, an Avon rep. She came to A Miner Miracle by way of an agency that helps low-income women start businesses; Davis wants to open an insurance billing company. A mother of four girls, aged three to 14, she receives government assistance,just as her mother did before her. “My mom was sixteen when she had me. Still, she continued to go to school and get a master’s. But I was rebellious. I didn’t finish high school.” She did, however, get her GED; she married at 19. “He was abusive before [the marriage], but I thought he would stop,” she says. After her divorce she unwittingly took up with other violent men and left each one feeling “numb, a functional depressive. I’d get my kids off to school but not think about the future.” She now counsels victims of domestic violence, and ending 14 years on welfare is within reach. “The majority of the time, you’re in the red,” she says about living on public assistance. “It’s sad because it makes us women do things that we shouldn’t do, that we don’t want to do, just to survive.”
Some Miner
Do's and Dont's
In addition to their outfits and makeover, Kathy Miner’s clients leave her office with a checklist of invaluable job interview tips.
Do...
- Wear spotless, well–fitted clothing
- Iron clothes both inside and out
- Make sure sleeves don’t hang over wrists
- Be sure hems aren’t too long or too short
- Wear skin-toned stockings
- Wear low-heeled black, navy or brown pumps
- Have clean hair–with no dandruff
- Pull long hair neatly back
- Keep fingernails clean and short; use only clear (not colored) nail polish
- Keep skin clean and moisturized
- Carry a small handbag (in good condition)–or nothing
- Keep a lipstick and hairbrush handy
Don't...
- Wear perfume or use an overwhelmingly strong-smelling soap
- Wear a lot of jewelry: a wristwatch, small earrings (no larger than a dime) and, if appropriate, a wedding ring, are acceptable
- Wear face jewelry
- Wear tight clothing
- Wear leggings or stirrup pants
- Wear dirty or scuffed shoes or spiked heals
- Carry a backpack to an interview
- Chew gum
- Wear white stockings (unless, perhaps, you're interviewing to be a nurse)
- Dye your hair a weird color (e.g., green, purple, orange)
Moving into a new apartment, Miner gave away the possessions that characterized her old life. “I had all these beautiful clothes. So I called a women’s shelter and asked, ‘Do you have anybody in job training I could dress?’” Long before she realized she was starting a new career, Miner found her first seven customers. But the size 6 outfits in her closet were too small. Since she had promised clothing, she cold-called Koret to help her make good on her word. Go out on a limb, and God will grow a tree under you; Koret sent 35 new suits.
Four years later, A Miner Miracle serves 600 clients a year, operating on enough state and private grant money to pay Miner a salary. Last year 64 percent of her clients found work. Today she is an authoritative voice in a field of well-meaning but confusing advice. One job program recommends dressing for interviews “in your Sunday clothes.” To some women, that means church dresses and hats; to others, sweatpants for watching weekend television.
Miner has rules: no short skirts, high heels, dark stockings or perfume. “You don’t want to remind a prospective employer of his ex-wife or her dead grandmother,” she instructs. In a recent week she laid out the gospel of dressing for four women, including Gonzalez, who was referred by a caseworker at a housing project for single parents. A business school for women who have encountered great adversity in their lives and are trying to get back on their feet sent Teleatha Davis and Margot Weisgarber. The fourth (who wished to be anonymous) came from a drug and alcohol treatment center.
Although Miner is giving away clothes, she really has to sell them. In a store, these outfits wouldn’t attract most of her clients, particularly the younger ones and those who have never worked in an office. “Their perception of themselves doesn’t match what’s in the mirror,” says Miner.
Holding up a black suit, she enthuses to Gonzalez, “You’ll live in this!” The younger woman is unconvinced. “It’s not really me,” says Gonzalez of the first ensemble. “They’ll be hiring me, but it’s not really me.” She expresses a preference for the tight, boot-cut pants that she’s seen in clubs.
The woman from the treatment center says she hasn’t worn a skirt in two years. “I hate wearing them on the bus, and running around in pumps when I have to drop off my son, my legs get cold.” Miner favors pants herself but responds by asking, “Are you willing to do what it takes to get a job?”
Weisgarber, who tells Miner she has paid little attention to her looks since her double mastectomy, has held office jobs and acted in film and theater. At 51 she knows how to dress and make herself up but no longer has the funds to do so properly. “I can put a look together,” she says, “but it’s a facade, a costume. I don’t want to look like someone else.” Miner tells her gently, ‘Women like you have worked hard to make changes on the inside. I want the outside to match.” She produces a Nancy Reagan-red suit. Weisgarber feigns blindness from looking directly at it but tries it on, then asks for her boots back. “Wrong shoes,” says Miner. “Who made up these rules?” asks Weisgarber, before revealing a rule of her own when Miner displays a flower-print skirt. “Soft, fragile women can’t wear flowers,” she declares. “It’s like fragile on fragile.” What Weisgarber wants is sartorial armor.
Nicole Wills, a former heroin addict, was a Miner Miracle client two years ago, referred through a drug program for parolees. Now she works part-time for Miner as a makeup instructor. A self-described “old San Francisco hippie,” she uses concealer to cover small tattoos of the Big Dipper and Southern Cross constellations on her cheekbones. Wills is a perpetual “after” piciture, with neatly coiffed salt-and-pepper hair, whose “before” story allows her to relate to the women who sit with her at the makeup table. “Make sure you blend your foundation past your jawbone,” she counsels in a sandpaper voice. “We’ve all seen that lady at the bus stop whose makeup ends in a line right here,” she says, pointing at her neck. “Actually,” she adds, “I’ve probably been that lady at some point in my life.”
Miner doesn’t probe people’s backgrounds, nor does she ration supplies based on their future outlooks. Everyone gets a chance, although, she says, “I don’t delude myself that I can help everybody. Some people, even with the right clothes, are not employable.” But with 2,226,000 California welfare recipients potentially affected by the new federal guidelines, every effort to ease the transition to work is needed. Sometimes it’s a suit, sometimes it’s Miner explaining the importance of being on time. Notes Michael Kharfen, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: “[On welfare] you know the check is going to come in the mail. You don’t have to get up at a certain hour. What may sound like simple preparation is making a difference.”
If changing clothes and makeup is a temporary measure, cutting hair is comparatively permanent, a literal shearing away of a previous persona. Gonzalez decides to take it all off. All that will be left of the hair that reaches down her back is a chic cap of curls, The pile of her locks on the floor will be carefully harvested and sent to a program that makes wigs for children with cancer. “I’m totally jazzed,” she says, twirling in the chair. “I have two kids. What if they were sick?” Good intentions notwithstanding, when stylist Eva Morgan lops off a seven-inch length of hair, Gonzalez’s eyes well with tears. “What if it turns out I’m like that guy?”
“Samson?” prompts Morgan. Gonzalez gives stylist Eva Morgan the go-ahead to cut...
“Yeah, Samson. What if I lose my strength?” But 45 minutes later, Gonzalez is empowered. She can’t stop looking at herself in store windows and the mirrors of parked cars. She can’t stop smiling. And when she returns to Miner’s office to take her “after” picture, she looks in the mirror and says, “Now the clothes look right.”
As Teleatha Davis leaves the office in one of her new outfits, she tosses off an insight worthy of Miner’s inspirational-quote collection: “I’m going to go till I stand up on both feet or I fall on my face.” Miner has given more than a make-over. “The intangible is confidence,” says Kharfen. “Can that be traced to makeup? It can.”