I've Been Away

I've been away for a while.  

Now I'm working at an urban community college, where our students range in age from 16 - 80. They are studying everything you can imagine.  And with our amazingly diverse student body comes a wide sense of style.

Let me start on the ground floor where the guys (and gals) in the trades programs can often be found in work boots, Carhart jackets and baseball caps.

On the first floor, in the kitchen, the culinary students wear toques, checked pants, and white jackets.  Girls with long straight hair and flip-flops are in the cafeteria drinking diet coke and eating potato chips, writing essays for their American Lit class.

Wandering to and fro everywhere are young women from East Africa in long skirts, bright head scarves and matching sandals.  

Up in the cosmetology lab (everything is a lab) are stylish African-American girls with beautiful manicures and intricate hair practicing theiNr styling skills on elderly blue-haired ladies from the neighborhood.  

At 5:30 as I'm leaving,  the evening students arrive, hurrying across the parking lot in their button-down shirts and chino pants to study entrepreunership.  (Sometimes I wonder if I'll see Stringer Bell coming to learn the art of management.)

Today I was in the bathroom and a student was changing her clothes in one of the stalls.  All I could see were her bare feet and her green Converse sneakers.  

And so I decided to return to my blog and search again for style in the streets of Saint Paul.