be more pleased. “They trust my judgment,” he says.
Brought up in the Tompkins housing project in Bed-Stuy, McMillan, from an early age, helped out at Elegante, the beauty shop his mother owned.
Lois McMillan was the first in her family to travel north from Milledgeville, Ga., and she gave her son a strong business sense. After school and during summer vacations, she’d pay him to sweep hair, wipe down shampoo bottles and run errands. “Customers would also tip me,” he recalls, “and I’d come home with a pocketful of change and think I was the richest young boy in the world.”
She also taught him the value of education and the pleasures of creative expression via piano lessons. When he narrowly missed being accepted into Brooklyn Tech, one of the city’s prestigious high schools, she gave him an example in zealous advocacy by convincing the school’s