A Stylish Reprieve : Mothers Get New Outlook on Skid Row

It was the week before Mother’s Day on Skid Row, and never mind candy and roses. Most of the mothers gathered inside the Fred Jordan Mission on Monday morning were just glad to have something to eat.

But the 200 women who came to the downtown shelter Monday got more than a meal. They got a makeover--from head to toe--in honor of Mother’s Day.

It meant that women who came to the shelter for nothing more than a shower or a simple reprieve from the streets took off their scarfs and got a new hair style. Mothers who could hardly afford a loaf of bread, let alone a tube of lipstick, got their faces done by professional makeup artists. And women who spend most of their days just trying to stay alive until the next said that for the first time in a long time, they felt good about themselves.

“Sometimes you got to take the makeup off and and just look like one of the fellas to make it down here,” said Katheryn Burroughs, a 27-year-old mother who was getting her hair styled for the first time in nearly two years. “But I’m still a woman, and I like to remember that.”

From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. through Thursday, professional makeup artists, hair stylists and manicurists will transform a men’s dormitory room inside the mission into a beauty salon where Skid Row mothers can be primped and pampered at no cost.

“They get lost down here,” said Pansy Newbill, a member of the mission’s staff. “We’ve seen so much need among the women that we decided to do something special for them.”

While volunteers watched the women’s children, mothers were able to make “appointments” in the mission’s chapel, participate in discussion groups with other women on the rigors of living on Skid Row, and simply enjoy being given a beauty treatment for a day.

But they could not escape reality completely. When they made their appointments and were asked for an address, most had none to give. And the windows of the fourth-floor room where they got their hair styled and their nails done looked out on the streets to which they would soon have to return.

And it is not easy looking pretty on Skid Row. Said Sherry Wright: “Most of the guys, when you’re pretty, they think you’re working (the streets). And if you’re not working, they get pretty rough with you.”

“I’ve got a guy living with me now that poses as my boyfriend just so guys will leave me alone. Daytime’s not so bad,” said Sherry Wright, 38, who is pregnant. “Only when the sun goes down.”

After lunch, the women filed out of the mission, their arms filled with gifts--a stack of new clothing, a food sack filled with canned goods and bread, a bag of makeup and costume jewelry.

They even got to fill out cards that the mission volunteers said they will mail to their mothers. And they got flowers--a single carnation, tied to a sprig of baby’s breath with a pastel-colored ribbon--and an invitation to come back again.

Maybe lipstick and a coat of fingernail polish are not going to change their lives, said Diane Dukes, 30, who put her scarf back on before walking out the mission doors and back to her room in a Skid Row hotel. But it did not matter.

“A lot of people down here are down, and you’re down because of the way you live,” Dukes said. “But you got to look pretty sometimes.”