the fashion plate doesn't fall far from the tree

Living most of the year in Africa when I was a child had a lot of awesome perks and there was none more awesome than buying my entire school wardrobe in one glorious shopping binge every summer. My mother and I would spend hours in the department stores of central New Jersey and then the clothes would mostly travel home to Africa un-worn, crisp and delicious for the start of a new school year. Often enough, the clothes were new in a school that was new with people, completely new. As rituals go, it was comforting.

One particular New Jersey summer shopping trip stands out. I was at the most nine or ten years old. We were in Sealfons, or Lord & Taylor, or maybe Macy's, my mother and I, at the business end of some very full bags of new school clothes. We must have been done with the shopping but were still in a browsy sort of mood. I spotted something, and I don't remember exactly the moment I did, but they were eggplant cotton cordoroy short-alls, and I fell in love. They were paired with a tee, dotted with little matchy eggplant-colored flowers. We can sit here and mock all we'd like that I fell in love with EGGPLANT SHORT-ALLS, and trust me, there's ample mocky material here, but it's really not the point.

My mother pointed out that we'd done all the shopping already; she pointed out that the short-alls weren't even school clothes, that I didn't need them. And she - and this is important - gently said no. And I remember being nine or ten and accepting that, walking away, not throwing a tantrum like I might have done when I was younger. We were walking down the polished department store aisle, away from the eggplant short-alls I'd set my heart on (perhaps because they matched my glasses?) and my mom turned to me.

She asked me if I was sad about the short-alls. I nodded. She asked if I felt all achy inside, like my heart hurt, because I was so sad not to have them. I said yes. And then she said okay, if I wanted them so badly to be heart-achy, then I should have them.

And my mom turned us around with all our shopping bags and bought me one pair of eggplant short-alls I didn't need, and I used them to distraction for about two years.

And aside from the fact that hey, I wore eggplant short-alls for TWO YEARS, the point here is that what my mother saw. Because she turned to me in a moment of quiet, a moment my tiny young brain was determined to overcome, and saw straight into me and understood that I might have been nine or ten and they might have been EGGPLANT FOR CHRISSAKES and I might have had more than enough clothes for that year, but I wanted them. And so she got them for me.

And that moment came back to me today, and I'm not sure why, but I realized it was something I needed to say to her for Mother's Day, something I could give her and show her, because she's in Greece and I haven't got a wrapped parcel to give. I need to thank my mother for being the sort of mother that could understand that heart-achy feeling when you just need a piece of fashion and there's no explaining it but you've got to have it. Maybe that wouldn't make the perfect mother for everyone but it makes her absolutely and without the shadow of a doubt the perfect mother for me.

And perhaps this is something that someone out there is going to judge, because some of you are judgy, but a gift my mother has given me is style and the times she gave it to me were sometimes, in those teenaged years of teenaged anguish, when we went shopping. It didn't matter how we clashed like the Titans over a million other things, my mother and I could always go shopping together and have an absolute riot of a time. We still can, the clashes having long faded away.

Thanks, Mom. For the eggplant short-alls you bought for me eighteen years ago to the three-inch patent black heels you bought me a month ago, when it comes to style and so many other things, you just know me better than I know myself and for that I love you. Happy Mother's Day. Let's go shopping when you get back.

inspiration

On August 16th of this year, Beth and I will have known each other for eight years. August 16th was the day after the Austin Dave Matthews concert, and Beth and I had found our we were roommates at Sarah Lawrence, with friends in common, both living in Texas. So we made plans to meet for lunch in Austin. I was so nervous, I made Alex come along. I needn't have. Beth and I started talking when the fajitas arrived and didn't stop talking until we said goodbye at our cars, both of us suddenly much more excited for the start of college. Really, we haven't stopped talking since.

Beth indulging in the world's biggest tub of Cheez Balls, during our Senior Year. I swear, she ate that entire thing over the course of six months.

We got to college and all the things that happen to you in college, well, they happened to us. We changed our ideas about careers, we fell in love with inappropriate people (remember Dreadlock Guy?), we had inappropriate people fall in love with us, we excelled in class (Beth) and did not so well in class (me), we got drunk, we had hangovers, and we grew up. But for me, hands down, the best thing to come from the entire Sarah Lawrence experience was Beth. From the very first minute of my freshman year to the day I graduated, Beth was my best - and sometimes only - friend. We lived together for the first year, and the second year, and when Beth spent the first semester of my third year on break from college, it was one of the toughest three months I've ever endured at college. I made all kinds of stupid choices without my anchor to keep me grounded. Little did I know that in that first year, when it seemed like we had no other friends, we had the only friendship we needed. I was starting to learn why my father told me, "If you've got a few true friends in life, you're lucky," but I do, and Beth's one of them.

I've always known why I'm friends with Beth. It's because I'm not stupid. When you meet someone like her - someone as kind, generous, forgiving, intelligent as she is - you don't let go for a minute. I know that she's all those things because I'm not the only one who spotted it and promptly placed themselves next to her for eternity. So did her boyfriend, Josh. They met in that semester that she was away from school, and they've been together ever since. I'd never heard her talk about anyone the way she talked about Josh, and when I met him, I understood. Here was a guy who saw what I saw in Beth - that she's sort of like an angel dropped in your life if you're lucky enough. They've been together ever since, and there were times when they were my only inspiration when it came to love. "If you two don't make it," I used to joke, "I'm joining a convent." They did. And when I found Stuart, the very first person I wanted him to meet was Beth. When he met her, that first week, and we had a moment alone at the bar, I looked at her and we both almost started crying. It felt just that good, and she felt like exactly the right person to share it with without having to say a word.

Beth, late February 2002, the day Josh arrived in New York City to live with her.

But before Josh (and then Stuart) came around, back in the sometimes-dark and always confusing college days, there were times when Beth and I were each other's only knights in any kind of armor. I remember, during a particularly rough moment when she was taking a semesters' leave in Dallas and sorting her life out, that she sat in the driveway of her building, on the phone with me, and didn't say a word for all the silent crying she had to do, for at least ten minutes. I remember a time, right after September 11th, that for totally unrelated reasons I was very alone, and very scared, and I could only make my legs move insofar as it took me to walk them to where she was waiting to hold me from falling down. I am proud to say that Beth and I never faltered for each other, even as we faltered for ourselves.

I say all this because for one, friendship like this isn't taken lightly, and I know that in twenty years, we'll be watching our kids run around the lawn and talking about mortgages and getting older, just the way we sat on the North Lawn watching our classmates running around and talked about conference papers and boys. I also say all this by way of introducing you to the marvel that is Beth, because I want you to help her in her latest conquest for excellence. She's joined a triathalon team to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. She's spending all spring training for a 32.1 mile triathalon and she's raising at least three thousand dollars on her own. And she's doing it because she knows she can, so I'm here doing this because I know she can too, and I'll be there next to the river and next to the road, cheering her on with every loud Greek gene in my body. Stuart and I have donated as much as we can to help her but I'd be an idiot if I didn't turn to you guys, my awesome internet, to point you here, to help her out too. I've told you all about Beth, and her kindness and gentleness and resilience and awesomely springy curly hair. There's no way you don't love her just a little bit, right? She really is that wonderful, and if I sound like I'm gushing, I am. But if you've got a few dollars, please throw them her way. For her, and for best friends everywhere, the kind of people that will really go thirty two point one miles out of their way to raise such an enormous sum of money for people who so desperately need it. That's the kind of friend that Beth is, and now I'm sharing her with you.

Beth in the East Village, Winter 2003.

Help out. And when I'm cheering her on, you will be too.

all hallow's eve

Last year I was Piglet. Two years ago, I was the blonde one. The year before that, Holly Golightly. Tonight, we're hanging out with Shana and watching the freaks disband in Chelsea after a good dinner and a rousing game of Clue, but Saturday night's festivities were the part with the costume dilemma.

In college, I mostly ignored Halloween. In high school, I was a cat, a gypsy, and a cheerleader. As a kid, mom usually made my costumes because we were living in Africa so there wasn't much to go on. I remember being a little red devil with an adorable foam trident, a southern belle in a yellow silk dress with matching parasol, and one year, a little Indian girl. Feathers and all.

When I was about seven or so, we were living in New Jersey. Mom must have had a cold or something, I remember knowing she wasn't feeling well, so I presume she went with the luxury of being in America and able to buy me a costume. That year, Dad trick-or-treated me around the neighborhood, holding me by the paw of my Pound Puppy costume. I remember with some hilarity the solemn fear I had that my mother must have been deathly ill indeed, to not be able to sew me a costume. She laughed when I recalled it for her, pointing out that it must have just been a little cold or something. For me, it was devastatingly serious, though.

This year, it was four PM and I couldn't decide what to do. Stuart landed on Arthur Dent as the path of both least resistance and most applicability, what with being English and obsessed with Douglas Adams. I still didn't know. I was going to give up and just go as a photographer when the idea struck. We'd found this little pin at a thrift-store weeks back that said simply "Nixon's the One".

I got dressed all in black, blow-dried my hair stick-straight, lined my eyes in dramatic black liquid-liner, grabbed a black flashlight, affixed the pin, and went as the Watergate Burglary.

I had to explain my costume to exactly everyone at the party. About half of them laughed. It may not be on par with Holly or the little red devil, but I think it at least wins my most esoteric costume ever award.

Happy Great Pumpkin day, everyone.

childhood, i

This may turn into a sporadically ongoing thing. It may not. I'm capricious like that.

When I was about nine years old, I had two best friends that were sisters. Well, we weren't all best friends. Anna was seven and Julia was ten so by rights, I should have been closer to Julia. But Julia was a mature ten and I was a more innocent nine, so Anna and I got along famously.

Their mother was Scottish and their father was Brasilian and you wouldn't know that Anna had anything of her father, or Julia had anything of her mother. The family was split down the center like that, some sort of folded card of genes. Anna and I used to color pebbles with chalk, thinking up elaborate designs and then setting them up on a table outside her house and try to sell them to the perplexed Africans that walked by. On days we did this, sometimes my mother would send along our driver with a few coins and he would lightheartedly make an exaggerated show of buying our merchandise, perhaps in the hope that his vocal appreciation of our pebbles would lure more buyers. But no, we were just spoiled white foreigners trying to sell rocks. Only our childish innocence on the matter prevented it from probably being insulting to passersby.

Julia, possibly a little jealous of my natural inclination to her baby sister, would often disturb our quiet little pretend games or our elaborate make-up houses (which were really sheets draped across small trees and borrowed pots and pans). She was a sweet girl when she wanted to be but too much a bully for my tastes.

I was often intimidated by their father, and I found myself disliking the way he'd come over to visit my parents (they were all great friends) and joke that my mother was a grand dame with fine things. He would call her Doris Day. Now, my mother explains that it was all in jest, but even she admits it was done with a slight pique. His wife was the picture of grace and sweetness, and when she called my teddy bear "Boo Bear" instead of Bow Bear, I thought she didn't understand his name. But she was so nice, I never corrected her. I know now it was because of her lilting Scottish accent.

There was a time that Anna and Julia were over, and Julia and I got in a spat. She started to storm down the front path, intending to walk the ten minutes back to her house, and I knew if she got out the door I'd be in trouble with both our mothers so I ran after her. We must have tussled briefly, I may have called her a name or something, but what ended up happening was that I fell down on the stone pathway and scraped the side of my left knee to hell. I was bleeding and yelling at her, and she managed to get out the door and home.

My parents scooped me up and bandaged my knee and consoled my raging heart, but I was grounded anyway. I found this spectacularly unfair, as Julia had been the one to throw the mile-high temper tantrum in the first place, but my mother explained to me that I had been host, even if she had been rotten I was meant to take the upper hand.

It was the first time I remember my parents teaching me that life's lessons aren't always fair, that you sometimes end up with both the scar and the unfair burden of punishment, because being a grown-up means knowing better even when others don't. It remains my least frustrating and most memorable grounding, only because I think I understood something that day. I took my punishment gracefully. I still have a nobbly scar on my left knee.