Episode nine featured the warehouse sale for charity, I wish this episode was longer because I could have watched this forever, it was so fun to see how fast-paced that day was.
I know, that episode needed to be like three hours. Actually, it could have been forty-five minutes long because that's how long it took to sell out.
How did that even come to be?
We get a lot of items that either didn't sell or people say "Just donate it for me," and we started getting a lot. So I got a warehouse and we would just box it all up with the intention of doing some kind of sale, but we didn't know what. I had been saving all these items for a year, and when the show came about, I thought it was perfect. We'll pull it all out, we'll do a charity sale, and my boyfriend had just built the Greek Hellenic Museum, it hadn't even opened yet when we had the sale, and it was the perfect venue for it. I wanted to do a bag sale because I didn't want people shopping for items, I just wanted the stuff gone and we just wanted to raise money for charity. There were 15,000-plus pieces and I was like, what are we going to do with all the leftovers after the sale? The last thing I want to do is box it all up again and move it back into storage. At the end, there was one single glove left on a table at the end. We did a morning news piece the day before the sale and they showed off what we had, Armani, Chanel, just things that didn't sell, and the next owning I got a call from the police at about 7:30 to tell me I had a line over the freeway.
How many people actually got in?
I would say probably about seven hundred. We raised over $12,000 in forty five minutes. That money went to the Primo Center, which is a group that benefits underprivileged women and children in the city. The day before the sale, a group of women came in and we styled them and outfitted them with new wardrobes, so that in itself was rewarding, those women were glowing. It was awesome.
Do you wish you raised the price so you could have earned more money?
No, I don't think so. At the end of the day it was about raising what we could and clearing out merchandise that had no home. We're going to make it an annual event now.
Let's talk about Nicole, because things start to get a little tense with her this week.
She was negative the whole time we were planning the event. She was convinced it was going to be a failure, she thought we'd have to truck people in and that no one would come to the sale.
Did you know she felt that way and was saying things behind your back?
I didn't. She wasn't voicing any of that to me. I had several complaints that she wasn't helping and that I should send her home, we were all working hard, but she was off doing her own thing. The only time anything clicked for me what the one time I put on the headphones and was listening to her film a scene that day, that was the only time I ever did this all season, and I heard her tell Jena "We need to clean up that table…You know how Corri is," and I was like, Oh my God, you're undermining me and you don't even believe in this event. You need to be on board!
Let's talk about LaToiya's closet clean.
LaToiya lived in a very small house and she has stuff from high school — HIGH SCHOOL — she had so much stuff. And she had her alter ego Ta Ta. She was so much fun. She was great, we confirmed for her that some handbags that an ex had given her were fake.
What's the general reaction when someone finds out their stuff is fake, does that happen a lot?
It's a mixed bag. For instance, yesterday we did a closet clean in someone's home and all the bags were fake. But when the client called, they told us they had all this Gucci and Louis and we got there and it was all fake. And we don't want to offend anyone but you have to explain this to the client. And we also don't want them taking it to another outlet to get rid of it. It shouldn't be sold. And she's claiming Neiman Marcus ripped her off. I'm like, what Neiman Marcus are you going to? So you get a lot of that, and then you get people who had no idea. When your husband gives you something, you're not running off with a diamond tester, you assume it's real, so no one wants to hear that their items are fake, but a lot of people know. If you knew the back end of counterfeiting, it's really dirty, but luckily the government is taking a harder stance on it. But we have to check every single piece that comes through. Authenticity is something we harp on and are working on every day.
2012年4月25日星期三
2012年4月9日星期一
Living the DREAM: Undocumented Youth Build Lives in America
The story of Raul Garcia, a good-looking young man who's quick to smile and extraordinarily easy to talk to, is much more typical. When he was two years old, Raul's mother carried him over the U.S. border on her back. Unlike Lorella, Raul grew up in a crime-ridden neighborhood in Hartford and got caught up with the wrong crew. In middle school, he started dealing drugs, carrying a freezer bag of cocaine and ecstasy wherever he went.
After graduating from high school, Raul stopped dealing and enrolled at a local community college using a fake social security number and much of the family's savings. He graduated with honors in communications in May of 2010, but the most meaningful part of his college experience was co-founding a program dedicated to tutoring high schoolers from Hartford's poverty-stricken neighborhoods. Raul's face lights up when he talks about this -- in an ideal world, he would devote his time to tutoring and mentoring at-risk teenagers.
Instead of turning his passion for mentoring teenagers into a career, Raul stands by himself in front of a 12-foot long printing machine for nine hours each day. A giant roll of paper spans the length of the machine, and onto it, Raul prints applications for things he can't apply for. "I have a lot of time to daydream," he says in a matter-of-fact tone. "In my head, I plan all these things I want to do. These fundraisers, these programs I want to start."
The printing factory was the only employer Raul could find willing to risk breaking a federal law by overlooking his status. Raul is slowly working towards a BA at the University of Connecticut, but because he can't apply for financial aid, he can only take one class at a time. He's wanted to marry Andrea, an American citizen and the mother of his two-year-old son, for years, but because he didn't come to the country with a visa to begin with, he would have to leave the country first and then prove that Andrea faces "exceptional and extremely unusual hardship" without him there.
Perhaps more depressing than all this is the fact that Raul may be paying for his mistakes for a long time. Because he didn't know to leave the social security number blank on his community college application, for example, he may have unknowingly created legal barriers to his eligibility for the DREAM Act if the act ever passes. Because his parents have no savings, and because he spent his high school years befriending drug dealers and not, like some C4Ders, befriending Americans who could help him pay for college, he pays for his college education alone. And because he now works, takes classes, and cares for his family, Raul hasn't made time to inform himself about opportunities for undocumented students.
When I ask Raul how he manages to stay positive while living with so many barriers to his success, his usual charismatic smile gives way to a tired, dejected look. "I have to put up a front," he says quietly, "But it's like a psychological prison."
Realistically, Raul may already be a lost cause -- in fact, he is seriously considering leaving Andrea and his son to make a life for himself in South America. But his situation is still better than it was 10 years ago because he is part of a community of students who are getting sick, as Lorella puts it, of "viviendo en las sombras" -- of living in the shadows. The budding movement's literature circulates among friends, and every two weeks, new people crowd into C4D's office for meetings. Its members drive long distances without licenses to speak at workshops in the hopes of motivating just a few high schoolers to envision lives beyond rock-bottom wages and the overbearing fear of deportation.
After graduating from high school, Raul stopped dealing and enrolled at a local community college using a fake social security number and much of the family's savings. He graduated with honors in communications in May of 2010, but the most meaningful part of his college experience was co-founding a program dedicated to tutoring high schoolers from Hartford's poverty-stricken neighborhoods. Raul's face lights up when he talks about this -- in an ideal world, he would devote his time to tutoring and mentoring at-risk teenagers.
Instead of turning his passion for mentoring teenagers into a career, Raul stands by himself in front of a 12-foot long printing machine for nine hours each day. A giant roll of paper spans the length of the machine, and onto it, Raul prints applications for things he can't apply for. "I have a lot of time to daydream," he says in a matter-of-fact tone. "In my head, I plan all these things I want to do. These fundraisers, these programs I want to start."
The printing factory was the only employer Raul could find willing to risk breaking a federal law by overlooking his status. Raul is slowly working towards a BA at the University of Connecticut, but because he can't apply for financial aid, he can only take one class at a time. He's wanted to marry Andrea, an American citizen and the mother of his two-year-old son, for years, but because he didn't come to the country with a visa to begin with, he would have to leave the country first and then prove that Andrea faces "exceptional and extremely unusual hardship" without him there.
Perhaps more depressing than all this is the fact that Raul may be paying for his mistakes for a long time. Because he didn't know to leave the social security number blank on his community college application, for example, he may have unknowingly created legal barriers to his eligibility for the DREAM Act if the act ever passes. Because his parents have no savings, and because he spent his high school years befriending drug dealers and not, like some C4Ders, befriending Americans who could help him pay for college, he pays for his college education alone. And because he now works, takes classes, and cares for his family, Raul hasn't made time to inform himself about opportunities for undocumented students.
When I ask Raul how he manages to stay positive while living with so many barriers to his success, his usual charismatic smile gives way to a tired, dejected look. "I have to put up a front," he says quietly, "But it's like a psychological prison."
Realistically, Raul may already be a lost cause -- in fact, he is seriously considering leaving Andrea and his son to make a life for himself in South America. But his situation is still better than it was 10 years ago because he is part of a community of students who are getting sick, as Lorella puts it, of "viviendo en las sombras" -- of living in the shadows. The budding movement's literature circulates among friends, and every two weeks, new people crowd into C4D's office for meetings. Its members drive long distances without licenses to speak at workshops in the hopes of motivating just a few high schoolers to envision lives beyond rock-bottom wages and the overbearing fear of deportation.
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