HatsOff4Cancer.com
5496 Baumgaqrtner Rd Suite 101
St Louis, Mo 63129
314-487-0765 Voice
15 Jan 2011

Press Release

For Immediate Release

St Louis will get its 24nd year look at the famous Working Woman Survival Show on 19-21 Feb 2011(www.wwssonline.com). Inside the St Charles Convention Center, more than 400 vendors will be showing their wares and services. However, one booth will be different, very different. More than 50 volunteer stylists from 20 different local salons will be cutting and styling for some of the show’s thousands of visitors. The price, you ask? A real bargain - just one NEW child’s hat for kids with cancer and losing their hair. As you know, losing their hair is the greatest fear the kids have, more than cancer or even losing their life. It is unbelievable how a small hat can produce such a big smile on a child. What can be better medicine than a smile, even if for moment?

The hats that are needed the most are the sizes for the 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 year old. The colorful and ones with cartoon-like characters are most welcomed. The hats must be NEW, because the kids' immune systems are damaged from their medicines. Anyway, the KIDS desire the best!

St Louis, you should be proud of your local salons and stylists that give their irreplaceable time and energy for helping so many visitors look and feel better with their new styles. You will not believe the fun both the stylists and visitors will have. In fact, many visitors will get adventurous and try that style they always wanted to. Every year more and more people will donate their hair of 12" or more. We take hair donations for making wigs for kids. Although our main mission is the HATS. Some people only get their hair cut once a year here!

The visitors share many warm and even some tear producing stories. A survivor told us that having cancer gave her mixed feelings of anger and guilt. She just wanted to be like everyone else with hair, so she bought hats, lots of hats, any kind of hat. But then she started matching the hats with outfits and buying outfits to match the hats. It got to be that everyone at her work was anxious to see what new hat she was wearing. No one were avoiding her any more. Her hats became so much fun for her, and now everyone was warmly supporting her. She said without doubt, that it was her hats that helped her through the roughest time of her life, so she brought some hats for the kids.

A gentleman asked if he could get his hair cut, but wanted to bring us a special hat the next day and he did. He also brought what we think was his entire hat collection of every major league football and baseball team, all never worn.

On the last day near closing time one year, a little girl (about 7 or 8) said she that she had heard about hats off 4 cancer on TV. She asked her parents to bring her to the show so she could deliver two hats she had specially picked out and paid for with her limited allowance. She also brought a bag of new toys for the kids because she said that the kids would not have any of their toys at the hospital to play with along with their new hats. One of her parents said that she used all of the rest of her allowance for the toys.

Every year, the WWSS visitors bring in hundreds of great hats for the kids. You could see that they spent some time to picked out hats that kids would love. Some had gone to shops that specialize in custom embroideries and had super things stitched on their hats for the kids. The visitors also need to do one more thing to complete their hat donation: each donor writes their words of encouragement on a small 3 by 5 card, which we then enclose with their hat in a separate 1 gallon zip-lock bag. Before we gave the hats to the kids, we read each and every card to ensure that words were politically correct for the kids. We find every word was perfect and straight from the donors' hearts. Not one bad card in the thousands that we have received. Here it’s all right to mention your creator’s name and use the word "prayer". More than once we had to stop and clear our own tears in reading their words. As in the past, last year every hat was just adorable and perfect for kids!

Over the last years, we have delivered large bags of many unique, colorful and specially designed children’s hats to the local Children’s Hospitals. The hospital staff were elated with the hats, because they know the positive effect that the hats will have with the children, and their families. We also respond to special requests for individual kids all over the United States.

One of the most asked questions we get is how many hats do we get for the kids? We truly do not count anymore, because if we just get one "make a kid happy" hat, we are successful, very successful. One year, we received a touching E-mail from a mother whose toddler is fighting with cancer. She was at one of the Omaha hospitals and was discussing how hard it was to find a toddler’s hat. One of the staff members came back with her arms full of the donated hats to choose from. Her son just loved two he picked out. Ironically, the two-year-old picked a hat that was donated by a person with the same first name!

It is events like these that renew our faith and our faith in people. We feel so much generosity and friendliness, which we hear, is just normal for St Louis. What we learned at the WWSS is what is just normal: people are good. St Louis, you should be proud for the help your community gives to your children fighting for their lives against cancer. We cannot wait for our nineth year show and see all of you at the great WWSS show, now in their 21th year.

Margaret Honaker

Master Stylist

Salons4u.com (Margaret@brick.net)

HatsOff4Cancer.com

Margaret created the Hats Off for Kids program specifically to be performed at the WWSS. Margaret and her daughter, Heather own and operate Glamm Studio & Spa in South St Louis County. More details and pictures of the shows can be found on her web sites www.HatsOff4Cancer.com, www.GlammStudio.com and the WWSS web site (www.wwssonline.com). Making Hats off 4 Cancer happen in St Louis are the great people of the Midwest!

A special thanks to Matrix Professional Hair Products (www.matrix.com) and Redken (www.redken.com) for the product samples that they always provide to use and give out to all of the wwss visitors.