Salvation Army’s troops deliver meals
1,400 boxed lunches a day distributed to encampments
Mitchell Fetterling used to cook $400perperson dinners in a South of Market restaurant that takes reservations two months in advance. Now he’s passing out free boxed lunches in the same neighborhood.
It’s all food, he said. And it seems the person getting the sandwich needs it more than the person getting the quail, caviar and sea urchin toast.
“I’ve been out of work since the pandemic started, and I felt like I ought to do something to help out instead of sitting at home and waiting,” he said.
Fetterling is one of scores of volunteers who deliver 1,400 boxed lunches a day to homeless encampments in San Francisco on behalf of the Salvation Army. Every day, volunteers gather at the organization’s local headquarters at 850 Harrison St., load the cardboard boxes into a fleet of cars and spread out, looking for encamp
ments.
They’re not hard to find. There are no tents in Yosemite Valley right now, but there are a good number of them in Hayes Valley, Eureka Valley and Visitacion Valley. And every alley, sidewalk and traffic island in between.
The meals are pretty good. The sandwiches are not peanut butter on white bread. Last week, they were chicken breast on focaccia. You also get corn chips, an apple, a cookie and a bottle of water.
Maj. Matthew Madsen, whose greatgrandfather ran the San Francisco branch of the Salvation Army in the 1940s, said passing out food is all about “honoring people, wherever they are.” (The organization, he said, is always looking for volunteers to hand out sandwiches and for donations to buy more. To do either, visit goldengate. salvationarmy.org.)
The volunteers tried to give a sandwich to a man at Turk and Hyde streets who had a syringe by his side and appeared unresponsive, Madsen said. The volunteers summoned paramedics, who administered first aid. The volunteers saved the man’s life, Madsen said.
“We’re the Salvation Army,” he said. “Saving people from addiction is what we do.”
The volunteers have no list of addresses. They drive until they see the tents, park the car with the Salvation Army logo on the side and walk up to the tent flaps.
“Salvation Army — would you like a meal?” the volunteers say. If the tent flap opens, the next part is tricky. To maintain 6 feet of social distance, a volunteer sticks his or her gloved arm out completely and asks the recipient to do the same.
“It’s not 6 feet every time,” said volunteer Lynn Olender, a hospital nurse who spends her day off passing out chicken sandwiches. “But we try to be careful. I try to be as safe as I am at the hospital. At the end of the day, you’ve helped others. That’s what this is about.”
Isaac HenryJohn, an assistant program manager at the Salvation Army, says he sees new clusters of tents every time he drives out with a load of boxed lunches.
“They’re popping up everywhere,” he said. “Places they’ve never been before. Any place where someone can hunker down, that’s where they go.”
Doityourself haircut: Beauty salons may provide a nonessential service, but when you need a haircut, you need a haircut.
And now you can get a doityourself haircut by teleconference. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Novato beautician Nicole Hitchcock was giving a longdistance haircut on a video call the other day to a client in Petaluma. Performing a longdistance haircut turns out to be a little like performing a longdistance appendectomy. Sharp implements are involved, there is scant margin for error and the concept seems dubious to begin with.
The customer, Amy Carter, normally gets her haircut in person, with Hitchcock wielding the scissors. This time, the scissors would be in Carter’s own hands, and Hitchcock would be watching and advising from 10 miles away.
“We’re going to remove the teeniest amount on the left side,” Hitchcock said, and she held her shears up to the camera and grabbed a hank of her own hair to demonstrate to Carter what the teeniest amount looks like. She said it was oneeighth of an inch in length.
Carter, in Petaluma, grabbed her own hair the same way, took up her own shears and snipped. But her teeniest amount wasn’t as teeny. She snipped off a quarterinch. That would seem to be close enough, but it turns out that haircuts aren’t horseshoes. Woefully, the two women regarded the imbalance — entirely undetectable to a newspaper reporter watching from San Francisco — as if Carter’s head were the Titanic, listing to starboard and about to go under.
To make things right, don’t you just snip off oneeighth of an inch from the other side?
“No!” Hitchcock said. “You risk making another mistake, and then you go back and forth trying to even things out.”
Pretty soon you run out of hair, a condition familiar to many of Hitchcock’s clients of the male persuasion.
The solution, Hitchcock said, was to use the texturing shears — an entirely different tool in the beauty shop arsenal — to “blur the line” of the hair ends.
“To the naked eye, the difference in length becomes erased,” she said, and the texturing commenced. “We’re blending and softening.”
When it was over, Carter’s hair looked every bit as wonderful as it ever did. The two women declared the haircut a success, which was a good thing because it had cost Carter $599 for the haircut kit (includes shears, combs and one haircut consultation).
If longdistance haircuts take off, Hitchcock said she could rehire some of the stylists she furloughed from her 20chair salon.
“The biggest thing a client faces with the shears in her hand is fear,” Hitchcock said. “The client doesn’t want to make a mistake.”
Carter said she had tried cutting her own hair in the past and, after the inevitable mishap, she has “always been able to go to the salon and get it fixed.” But when you are ordered to stay at home, she said, your hair must stay at home with you.
“Next time, I’ll do it better,” she said. “I’m learning.”