By Jasmine Michaelson

Alisa West and Joy Shaw are standing next to a rack of women's blazers discussing the color of the far wall behind the cash register, which has just been painted a creamy butter yellow.

Joy is small and petite with short light sunny blond hair that sweeps across her forehead and around her cheeks. She has dark arched eyebrows and real live Marilyn Monroe mole just above the left corner of her mouth. She's wearing a white button down shirt with blue floral cropped pants and white sandals. Her toenails and fingernails are the same fuschia pink.

Alisa is tall and slender with chin-length ash blond hair that she's tucked behind her ears. She's wearing pink lipstick and dangly gold and lavendar beaded earrings that swing around every time she moves her head. A long scarf, the same lavendar, is wrapped around her neck and knotted loosely in the front. It lies on a soft, long-sleeved green sweater. She's pushed the sleeves up to her elbows. The sweater is tucked into tight dark blue jeans.

Joy wanders over to a rack of dresses and fingers a vintage short-sleeved, collared dress with a retro grass green and white pattern.

"Now, I like that," she says. "Well, the pattern, not the cut."

"Actually," Alisa says, "It would look really good with a pearl drop waist belt. It would have kind of a '20s look."

Joy and Alisa jobshare the role of head manager of Somebody's Attic, a strictly nonprofit thrift store in downtown Logan, which turned 16 last October.

Born in the basement of another downtown business donating a yearly sum of $10,000 to charities, the Attic now resides in a clean (if not old) and spacious two-story building all its own on 100 North, just west of Main Street. And last year alone it donated more than $70,000 to local charities.

"That's something we're really proud of," Alisa said. And it's something she attributes to a serious business mentality, which includes being selective about what goes out on the floor (dirty, damaged or otherwise items get sent to Deseret Industries), keeping the store clean and organized and offering merchandise at the lowest possible price (the average cost for an item is $2.50).

"This is a business," she said. "We're making money to give it away."

Every year the Attic donates to Community Abuse Prevention Services Agency (CAPSA) and the Child and Family Support Center of Cache County, Inc.

The remainder of the donations go to other community nonprofit organizations that apply for yearly grants with the store. Last year the food pantry got a good chunk of the money.

"We really try to go across the board," Alisa said. "We want to find ones that will help a lot of people."

Even the store itself acts as a benefit to lower income families in Cache Valley by offering quality products at such low prices, she said.

Management does everything in its power, she said, to make shopping at the Attic a retail experience--whether that means putting only the best out onto the sales floor or re-painting the walls or just plain keeping things organized and attractive.

"I am a psycho about racks," Alisa said. "I feel like if you look in the medium section you should be able to find medium-sized clothes."

And every Monday members of management reorganize the display windows to coordinate with holidays, seasons or other relevant themes.

"If this is your only option," Alisa said, "I don't want you to lose self-respect by shopping here."

Alisa, Joy and several other managers receive "livable" wages to keep the store thriving and running smoothly, but Alisa readily admits that the place wouldn't exist were it not for help from the community in the form of monetary and merchandise donations and volunteers.

At any given time, there are between 36 and 45 volunteers working at the store, whether three hours weekly or even more frequently than that. They come in the form of teenagers who have been sentenced to community service hours, people who believe firmly in what the store does, frequent shoppers who are lured in by the 10 percent discount volunteers get and people who just kind of fall into it.

As is the case of Thelma, the gray-haired woman with sparkly green eyes behind the cash register today.

Seven years ago she was shopping in the store, when she noticed how shorthanded Joy was.

"She needed to go to the bank to get change," Thelma said, "but she couldn't leave the cash register. So I just asked what I could do to help."

She's been coming back every week since.

"They've been good to me," she says, smiling warmly.

Alisa said the volunteers always manage to get very close, as is demonstrated as she hugs another volunteer, a middle-aged mom who's going in for surgery the next day.

"We'll be praying for you, sweet pea," she says.

In the back room, where all the sorting and pricing of items takes place, Alisa leans on a table in the middle of the room fiddling with a string of pink plastic beads and says that nonprofit work is addictive. Surrounded by racks of hangers and piles and boxes and shelves and garbage bags full of clothes and random items she says it helps to be a little crazy.

"Well, maybe not crazy, but very adaptable," she says. "I guess that's part of why this job appealed to me. I mean you do a lot of the same work, but the items are never the same, the people change."

In the back room alone, the only things that are permanent are the table Alisa's leaning on, the walls and a dog-eared close up picture of James Dean in a black turtleneck taped to the wall.

"He's the rebel without a cause," she says with a laugh, "and I'm the rebel with a cause. Besides, he's just too cute!"

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