Navigation

Archive | Essays

Edie Sedgwick, Signs and Sirens Superstar

April 20, 2019 in Age Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Style Matters

A beautiful birdie reminded me today is the birthday of Edie Sedgwick, she of the ermine hair, silvery limbs, eyes like a Day of the Dead painting. Edie’s glamour was rooted in the visibility of her exoskeleton, and the most iconic photographs taken of her caress those cheekbones, clavicle, hipbones, the tiny exposed infrastructure of her wrists and upper arms. I still admire the effect though her eating disorder helped launch my own. I even had a name for it: Glamourosa nervosa.

Dying the year I was born, she would have been 76 today, but Edie never was going to live that long. Hers was the last-hurrah glow of a star shooting into oblivion, her no-holds-barred radiance the original heroin chic. Yet even at her most junked-up, goth was as far from her aesthetic as from a Swedish nun. Now that I’m twenty years older than she ever became, I grok her poor-little-rich-girl limitations—namely, being the art rather than making the art. Not even today can you live into your 30s without learning to live without an audience. Still, I’m so grateful for how she lit our path with striped shirts and chandelier earrings. To those of us bridging the mid-20th century and the new millennium (aka we Gen Xers looking backward to find our future), Edie was all the 1960s at once and we loved her for it.

The Church of Menschen (See What I Did There?)

April 14, 2019 in Book Matters, Church Matters, Essays, Etiquette Matters, Spirit Matters, Weather Matters

The “not cute one,” if you can believe them apples.

The great Eve Babitz tells a story of being out one night with a friend who had extreme cheekbones.

It is my opinion that people with extreme cheekbones make all other beauties look like children’s drawings, even if this latest batch of young people don’t seem to recognize this fact and I wouldn’t wish this level of beauty on anyone. I do not say this because I have extreme cheekbones; I have decent ones.

My mother has extreme cheekbones.

Anyway, Eve and this friend were sitting at Barney’s Beanery, because this is where Eve always could be found in her wonderfully misspent youth. And a man approached them. Even a block away it was apparent this man was just the strain of trouble that some extreme beauties seek because everything else is too easy. He was unapologetically drunk, for one thing, and he also had a lot of dark wavy hair and a very arrogant manner. Continue Reading →

This Alley Cat Thanks You

April 12, 2019 in Age Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Spirit Matters

Once when I was 19, the summer after my first year of college, I made the mistake of going home again.

I’d been leaving home in one way or another since I was eleven–had been living with boyfriends off and on since I was 15–but at 18 had surprised everyone, most of all me, and got into a decent college and left the state.

What’s more, I went to a Quaker college in Pennsylvania, which meant I was surrounded by the kind of squares whose parents loved them and whose idea of fashion was Dockers and college logos. The music was Cat Stevens and Jimmy Buffett, the colors were grey and that green that has so much grey in it that it might as well go ahead and be grey. And I just about lost my mind.

I never really came around on that school socially–in my senior year, I was the butt of a class night joke in which they insulted my boyfriend’s taste in women–but that first year I hated the tyranny of their grey-greenness with such a punk-rock heat that they hated me with an equal fervor.

It was probably the least grey-green thing about them.

But I had been told by my grandmother that if I didn’t attend this particular school I’d be dead by 27. She told me six months after she died, which is how I knew she meant business. She hadn’t been that involved in my goings-ons while she was alive. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy