My (almost) original eyebrows

This photograph was taken when I was 18 years old. I made that green dress without the benefit of interfacing or stays, which it obviously needed. Still, I was a first year design student at FIDM and was only just beginning to develop good drafting skills. In this photograph I'm visiting my mother in Stockton California*, the armpit of the universe. It's not surprising that when I first got into design school at 17 years old and my mom decided suddenly to move to an armpit of a city and gave me the choice to move with her or stay in design school and make my way in the world with no support...

I chose design school and squatting at my best friend's house until we finally got a studio apartment together in San Francisco. Her mother, who is an incredible woman, never blinked about letting me live with them. Or if she did (and why wouldn't she hesitate to take in a chainsmoking mental teenager whose mother suddenly moved to Stockton) she never let me know it. Nothing but kindness and also she taught me to make lasagna.

Those eyebrows are unplucked, unshaved, and unwaxed. They are, however, slightly enhanced with brow liner. I used to have such large brows and now they are so much less substantial. I kind of miss those big brows. Now when I don't darken slightly with pencil they seem to only be half brows. Which don't make me look good.

I really can't say what's up with the pink shirt with pearls. It's like I was doing "Nancy Reagan visits the Renaissance Faire" look. (No one knew that was a look until now.)

I remember that I took the Greyhound bus up to visit my mom and brother. I had my hard shell forties suitcase with me which has since burned up in our attic fire and which I still sorely miss. It was so sturdy (and I was 115 pounds lighter) that I could use it as a seat while waiting to be picked up at the station.

Very cinematic of me.

Smoking cigarette after cigarette sitting on my old suitcase with my parasol protecting my pale skin from the punishing sun of the central valley.

Probably reading something serious like Thackeray.

I must have been a sight.



*It is very funny that nicknames for Stockton include both "all American city" and "most dangerous city in California". Yes, that sums up the US amazingly. As a whole that is our spirit. As Israelis say: we are all really fucking scary violent people with guns, us Americans.

Whiskey Of Distinction

First I buy fashion magazines for the love of the first flip through each month. When I was very young and unmedicated it was the most important thing in the world for me to be the first person to look through my copies. I once screamed the moon down over a room mate for having flipped through my Vogue before I did. Part of the enjoyment, I suppose, was the feeling that mine were the first hands to crease the pages, to fold it open, and that my copy would be explored by me, dirtied and crimped by me, before being handed over and shared with others. Maybe it was because I still had some residual anger left over from my toddler years spent in a commune in which I had nothing of my own. In any case, opening the newest fashion magazines every month was a ritual I looked forward to almost more than anything else. Especially through the FIDM years.

The first flip through is magic. The next one is scrutiny. The part where I start slamming Valentino for the use of giant bows AGAIN and Lauren of catering to the rich and boring. I needed to stretch the enjoyment out. So the third flip through was the part where I would cut or tear out all my favorite pages for my fashion scrapbook (I have three full fashion scrapbooks I've compiled over the years).

Lastly, I would flip through the whole thing looking for the best bits for collages. I still stubbornly have a collection of bits and scraps from magazines that I thought would be good for use in making cards. This card above is my all time favorite card using bits from my scrap box as well as photocopies of one of my favorite fashion through history books.

My son asks me what it means. Why is there blood coming out of the girl's eye? Why are there matches coming out of her mouth? I still can't possibly answer that question. It was about visual appeal for me. That, and I'm one macabre lady.

Impossibly, this card reminds me of a strange San Francisco adventure in which a friend of mine (who I've since realized might be a classic sociopath*) and I made pasta at the house of a hairdresser (for whom we were working, if you can call barely being paid "working") in his North Beach apartment, and I remember having the uncomfortable feeling that my friend was having an affair with the hairdresser and couldn't stop worrying about his wife, with whom we were eating.

This isn't exactly fashion, being more crafty, but it's how I recycle fashion in my life. I never could bear to part with this card. I put it here for posterity of some ethery kind.






*Not of the murdering kind. The kind of person who has no real conscience. This friend was notorious for dating inappropriate people and never seeming to care about anyone. I became really creeped out when I realized that she slept and dated people indifferently. Whether they broke up with her or not was a matter of supreme unimportance. Men would fall annoyingly and crashingly in love with her everywhere her black curls went. She could have formed a flotilla powered completely in broken hearts. I don't know if I ever knew a man who'd met her and didn't worship her abjectly.