Stacey Chambers. With her lovable bear hugs, palm-searing high fives, and gestures as animated as a plate-spinning juggler, she puts the “arm” in Charm City. And much like that limb attached to your upper torso, she’s a little more than just nice to have around; she’s integral to the functionality of Baltimore’s festival and farmer’s market scene.

This is because Stacey is several citizens rolled into one convivial woman: she is a small-business owner, a fashionista (though she wouldn’t readily call herself one), a supporter of local art, and a lobbyist for the local mobile retail industry, to name a few. You may not know her by face so much as by her preferred mode of transportation – a 1994 International school bus visually reminiscent of the “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” theme song.

Stacey and I recently met over sushi to discuss her life as the sole proprietor of Go Go’s Retread Threads – her mobile thrift store. At the ready with a pen and paper, I was eager to interview her, to learn all about her unconventional, if not altogether ballsy-as-hell, career choice. But not long after I’d started the interview with the annoyingly abstract statement, “So tell me about yourself”, the conversation veered like a bus driver making a hard turn, right into Battlestar Galactica. She was perturbed to learn it was going off Netflix; for a moment looking as though she might shed a tear on her chopsticks. “I fucking love that show,” she said.

Was I really surprised that the interview was starting out this way?

Frak no.

Because if there’s one thing Stacey Chambers is not, it’s predictable. And this is a good thing. Her sense of spontaneity allows her business to thrive, traveling from festival to fair to food market all over town, sometimes at the last possible minute. Of course, before she heads out to any of these places, she tweets and posts her forthcoming whereabouts to her social media pages. Doing so is simply sound business practice.

For example, a recent Facebook post: At ‪#‎msu on hillen below coldspring. Come shop ‪#‎msufollowers I don’t know how hashtags work but I know how electricity works… its shocking.

After a few minutes mourning the loss of Battlestar, the conversation resumed its original course.

“I always want to be fulfilled,” Stacey said, her eyes glaringly serious in spite of the smile on her face. “Even if I’m just packing my lunch. It’s for me, so I want to be fulfilled by it.”

So, four years ago, feeling completely unfulfilled by her shitty office job, she up and quit. “That part’s not as interesting as how the business actually started,” Stacey said.

Indeed, the genesis of Go Go’s Retread Threads is an uncanny story; perhaps even proof that Fate does make a guest appearance in our lives once in a while. In Stacey’s case, a plausible guess could be that Fate felt there weren’t enough businesses around selling secondhand tweed sports jackets and adorable pink pleated skirts.

“I told three people my idea,” Stacey said, obviously excited to be recounting this experience for what must be the umptieth time. “I told a twenty-one-year-old and two guys named Chris. One Chris repaired old cars and he was the one who told me about the bus for sale. So I went to see it. Turns out the seller knew a friend of mine all the way in Kentucky. Kentucky! And his name was Chris. So he knocked one thousand dollars off the price, got it through emissions and delivered it right to me.”

The story made me smile. Two guys named Chris, one in Kentucky, one in Baltimore, both who knew Stacey in one way or another. It seemed a bit like Six Degrees of Stacey Chambers.

But wait, what happened to the twenty-one-year-old? I opened my mouth to ask but Stacey wasn’t finished. “What’s really cool is that a lot of people tell me the story of their clothes’ lives after they buy them from me.”

I’d read about this experience of Stacey’s recently on her Facebook page. On September 27^th she’d posted from The Shindig at Carroll Park: So… up walks this couple… the dude said he bought a sweater from me two years ago with a handwritten tag on it that said ‘someone is going to fall in love with you in this sweater’ he said he was wearing that sweater when he met his girlfriend and she said she thought he was so cute, I [sic] the sweater and they wanted to share that with me. Sometimes things are wonderful. Reminder I need to hand write more moderately charming tags.

When I’d first visited Stacey’s mobile store, I’d rummaged through as many clothes as possible, reading each tag, intrigued. Most of them contained either a somewhat heartfelt or somewhat playful message handwritten by Stacey herself. When I told her how much I loved the tags, she chuckled. “That’s one of my favorite parts.”

Talking to Stacey felt like talking to a camp counselor. Halfway through our meal, I was telling her just as much of my back-story, complete with unsightly personal flaws, as she was telling me about her life, a lot of which didn’t pertain to her business (we got off-topic again).

But this is another charm of Stacey’s – her ability to get others to open up to her. “Lots of people talk to me like a close friend,” Stacey said. “People just open up about the problems they’re having – with their significant others, their crappy job, feeling uncreative, feeling lonesome. Or they tell me about good things in their lives. Or weird things.”

Seeing as how I’d been unwittingly divulging some of my biggest character flaws for about a half an hour now, I wasn’t surprised to learn this. There I was, telling Stacey all about my intense jealousy of other writers. And there was Stacey, listening intently, nodding. Later that evening, I wondered: Maybe Stacey is some kind of mystic? Some kind of compassionate yogi?

A few days later, after I’d asked Stacey if there was anything else she’d like me to include in the article, she responded:

I’m Cyborg.

(You can find Go Go’s Retread Threads and Stacey every Sunday at The Baltimore Farmer’s Market. You can also find her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/GoGosRetreadThreads or on Twitter @gogothreads)