The Tampa Bay LGBTQ community came together mid-December for a local woman undergoing chemotherapy.
6S Boutique owner Andrew Citino approached the community via Facebook with a simple request: if they were able, to donate spare blonde wigs for a woman who’d lost her hair to cancer treatment. “A woman going through chemotherapy has lost her hair,” he shared, “and we just want to help make her feel beautiful.”
“She is in her sixties,” he continued, advising “the wigs don’t need to be new. We can clean and condition them.”
Citino says that so many in the community reached out to offer their assistance that he had to stop accepting donations. Within three minutes, a performer in Sarasota contacted him to advise she was ordering wigs at that very moment. “And the phone kept ringing,” the boutique owner says, “and private messages filled my inbox.”
One concern he had was that his request would suggest he was soliciting others to buy wigs from 6S Boutique, something he adamantly didn’t want to happen. “Some did try, but we turned that down,” he says. “We just need some gently-used wigs.”
For his part, Citino says that all he did was make the post. “The community did the rest. We are so grateful,” he says. “We really are so lucky to live where the community is so large and so supportive.”
(Image from 6S Boutique’s Facebook page.)
