Talismans

Other than knocking on wood when I say "knock on wood," I don't have too many superstitions, although there is a very pretty old brick on Prospect St. that I make a point of always rubbing my heel on when I walk over it. Someone carved "Polk" into it in a lovely 19th-century script, and it's the only one I've seen with what I guess is very old graffiti. I find it charming, and so I regard it as a charm:

But while I may not be particularly superstitious, ever since my diagnosis, I find myself doing two things when it's time to see the oncologist, which I now do quarterly - and let's hope there's no need to see him more frequently, KNOCK ON WOOD (I just did). 

(Note: there are plenty of things I do in the anxious days before my appointments - watch insipid and/or escapist TV, bite my nails, etc., but I'm talking about the rituals on the day of my appointments.)

The first thing is that I always dress really nicely for my appointments. This isn't about impressing the doctor, it's some weird psychological need to know that if by chance there's bad news, well, damn it, I'm going to receive it while looking fabulous.

I did this in New Zealand on the afternoon that Sam and I went to see my neurosurgeon to find out what the post-surgery pathology report had said. I wore my white Karen Millen trench coat and carried the Gilda Tonnelli handbag, both of which I had bought in a Takapuna consignment store, as pictured here:

The second thing I do is that I have talismans. I can't rub my heel on the special brick when I see the oncologist, so I often wear or bring other lucky charms. There's the pendant of Ganesh, remover of obstacles, that I bought in Jaipur (previously featured in this post). And there's this little owl. When Jesse and I were detained at immigration in New Zealand on our way back from Samoa in December 2010, I kept rubbing it between my thumb and forefinger:

I also have a Chanel wallet that is simultaneously the most awesome and the most ridiculous thing I own:

This wallet, along with the owl necklace, was a gift from a dear friend, who sent it to me when I was in New Zealand. It previously belonged to a woman I was privileged to know: a festival producer named Marie who had exquisite taste, who bayed like a beagle when she was in the bathroom, and who never could figure out how to use the office intercom. Those of us who knew Marie especially remember that she had her assistant write complaint letters, and the stock phrase in those letters was "Imagine my mortification when." We've gotten many laughs out of this over the years.

Imagine my mortification when I got diagnosed with brain cancer at 39 years old.

Ergo, one should have a Chanel wallet.

I am very pleased to report that my MRI last week was uneventful, and my meeting with the oncologist was mostly notable for what he showed me on the MRI - the huge blank space in my right hemisphere where my neurosurgeon carved out part of the tumor. It looks like a pond, and it's absolutely incredible to me that despite this, I am me. To paraphrase from Whitman, I celebrate myself... I see, dance, laugh, sing... I sing the body electric. 

I don't for a second really believe that my talismans keep me safe from further bad news, but a lot of this is just luck, and I am lucky to even be well enough to care about how I dress for my appointments. 

Lucky, lucky me.

I haven't been doing much secondhand shopping lately, but I did want to show off this crazy Marni top my sister bought for me on eBay, as well as my wonderful eBay Miu Miu pants. eBay is always a bit of a gamble, particularly with European sizing, but when it works, it's a beautiful thing, as these are. 

Finally, I'm pleased to say that the This I Believe program has finally archived an essay I submitted last summer about cancer and how I define family. Enjoy.

Namaste, 

Kelley 

Cashmere and Pearls

I have always enjoyed walking through cemeteries. An advantage of living in New England is that one doesn't have to go far to find land full of crooked gravestones, many from the 18th century. About a mile from my house, there's the picturesque Little Neck Cemetery, where a passenger from the Mayflower is buried. Nearby are the small stones for four young sisters who died within days of each other in 1833. Today, on a whim, I stopped for a few minutes at the Rumford Cemetery, an historical cemetery that's also in East Providence. I'd passed it many times before, but had never wandered in.

I love old cemeteries because I admire the artistry of gravestone art - the skulls and wings, the vines and angels; Old English phrases like "Here Lieth;" the long "s" that still always looks like "f". I love the Puritan names that sound decidedly un-Puritan, like "Experience" and "Freelove," both of which I saw on women's gravestones. I love the permanent typo and correction I noted on a centuries-old stone, where the dead person's name, incorrectly carved "Carpeter," had an "n" inserted in carved superscript with a perfect proofreader's caret.

Mostly, though, I love cemeteries because I imagine the lives that were lived and the stories the dead could tell. I get choked up at the tiny stones of the four sisters, thinking about their parents, who were buried nearby some thirty years later, curious about and yet not wanting to fully imagine the virus or fire that decimated that family or how that marriage survived in the wake of such grief. I wonder what kind of women "Experience" and "Freelove" were and whether the stonecarver who forgot the "n" in Carpenter was upbraided for his mistake - was he an apprentice? 

Hundreds of lives and narratives, some of which were probably quite ordinary and some, surely, that bucked hard against convention: not least the Mayflower pilgrim, whose religion may not have looked like any form of Christianity today, but who fled persecution nonetheless, or the more recent immigrants from Portugal and the Azores who also traveled across the ocean to establish lives here. 

Perhaps it wasn't accidental that it was today that I decided to visit the Rumford cemetery and once again contemplate the richness of different lives. This week, at Smith College, my alma mater, the campus newspaper published an odious letter written by an alumna from the Class of '84 that lamented the current state - more specifically, the student composition - of the College. At every turn, the author finds fault with Smith students. Her college has gotten too full of first-generation college students. It's too poor, too gay, too full of people who aren't white, too foreign. Moreover, there simply aren't enough women in cashmere coats and pearls. 

For those of you unfamiliar with Smith, it is a women's college, historically one of the "Seven Sisters" schools in the US. It has long been considered one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country and is known for academic rigor and for producing high-achieving, accomplished women. Its roster of alumnae includes such luminaries as Julia Child, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Sylvia Plath, to name just a few. However, in earlier decades, it was populated more by rich white women from expensive prep schools and wealthy suburbs (hence the very white short list above). 

My time at Smith wasn't easy. I grew up in one of the very counties that the letter writer mentions, and I was, I am embarrassed to say now, just as ignorant as she in many ways. I hadn't spent much time around people different from myself, and it can be really uncomfortable to learn that you don't know as much as you think you do about the world. Oh, the arrogance of certainty, and in my case, youth. 

In my first year, I spent more time watching "Days of Our Lives" than studying, and wound up on academic probation. I left Smith in the middle of my sophomore year, when I was coming out of the closet and suffering from depression, took some time off, spent two semesters at Vassar, and, finally, returned to Smith, where, 18 months later, I graduated in the top 10% of my class.

Along the way, though, something happened: my eyes and mind were opened to the wider world. I began to care about the lives of people whose backgrounds and narratives were different from mine, sometimes markedly so. I began to care about the places those women were from. I became a global citizen, and I haven't looked back.

Since this alumna's letter was published, I've never been prouder to call myself a Smithie. Hundreds of us have posted our stories on the campus paper's website and on Tumblr feeds and Facebook pages. In mine, I noted that I'm still preppy (and I do still love my cashmere and pearls), but that my experience at Smith was not one where I learned to think more narrowly about life. What all of these gloriously different stories reveal - and what I think the gravestones today said, too, albeit more quietly - is that each one of us has something important to say. Smith, in my case, helped me learn how to say it, and to say it with conviction and without apology. 

Here I am, far right, in matchy-matchy white, yellow, and orange. But one look at my fellow Smiffenpoof (a cappella group) alums and dear friends below will tell you that while we may look like an unlikely tribe, we Smithies are a tribe nonetheless, and one in which I take tremendous pride.

Namaste,
Kelley

A Deeper Shade of Pink

...with apologies to Ray Barretto...

I don't need to re-hash everything that happened last week with the fallout from the Susan G. Komen Foundation's decision to withdraw its funding to Planned Parenthood, followed several days later by an all-too-obvious about-face. Suffice to say I'm not sorry that Komen has been exposed for its hypocrisy. 

Pink ribbons, yellow bracelets: what do they mean? In the beginning, they may have connoted survivorship, awareness, or empathy, but all too quickly they became hollow marketing gimmicks, and at least in the case of Komen, frequently linked to corporations that, in the words of Ricky Ricardo, "have some 'splaining to do" about how they can purport to promote cancer "awareness" while simultaneously selling toxic products. (Breast Cancer Action is the organization to support, folks. They call out the bullshit.)

Aside from all of that, I have a couple of major gripes with both Komen and LiveStrong:

The first is why, as a culture, we're so quick to support so-called cancer "awareness" for those cancers related to sexuality (at least, if you're heterosexual). I'm thinking here of the noxious "save the ta-tas" stickers and shirts (oh, and by the way, they're not only gross, but THEIR FONT IS HIDEOUS, and, since this is a fashion/design blog, let me also say that both Komen and the "save the ta-tas" folks really favor an INSIPID shade of pink). 

This "sexualization" of cancer is not only reductive for those women and men who are coping with breast and testicular cancers, but it demeans the very real sexual side effects that many of us have dealt with as part of our diseases and/or treatments, myself included. You don't have to have breast cancer, testicular or prostate cancer, or undergo a prostatectomy to become infertile or to experience a long-term loss of sexual desire. Other cancers can also wreak havoc on this part of your life. (To all of those husbands and wives and partners out there who have continued to love us and have been patient with us as we have, or haven't, gotten our groove back, thank you. We are blessed to be sexually and emotionally intimate with you.)

The second major gripe is that since these cancers get so much attention, perhaps because they're tied up very obviously in our collective consciousness with sex and virility, other cancers get comparatively little press, and, more crucially, research funding. 

Here's the thing, though: no cancer is sexy, and cancer doesn't play fair. If it did, I wouldn't have a glioma. No one "deserves" cancer: not me, not the two-pack-a-day guy, not my family members and friends and friends' friends who have had other cancers. (Take a look at Tara Parker-Pope's 2008 column on this topic. Note, too, that lung cancer is the biggest cancer killer. Is it underfunded because we associate it with smoking, an increasingly stigmatized behavior, or because it's not tangentially associated with getting it on?) 

But since our culture seems to be wedded to empty gestures and bumper-sticker politics, I'd like to request an "awareness" ribbon for gliomas. It will be an orange, pink, black and white Pucci print, and it will look like this:

Namaste,
Kelley

An auspicious start to the year

Somehow another month passed without a blog update. No matter - this allows me to do a quick summary of my first month of preppy thrifting in 2012. 

I was fortunate to make a trip to the Westport, CT Goodwill store during the second weekend in January. Like everything else in Fairfield County, it has a reputation for being expensive, with prices often more in the "consignment store" range.

One would definitely not shop there if one were really on a tight budget - frankly, you could probably find less expensive new clothes at TJ Maxx, Marshall's, or the big box stores. Despite the prices, however, Westport Goodwill also has a reputation for having excellent secondhand clothes, and frequently high-end ones at that (e.g., Prada, D&G). This was my first visit in three years, and it did not disappoint.

In these lightweight plaid Theory pants, I'll be ready for my cruise (it will be my first, with my parents, at the end of March). I'll also be ready for trips to Weekapaug and other preppy enclaves.* 

I plan to pair these with a coral Lacoste polo shirt (not shown) that I found at Savers later in January.

"Yes, please, I'd love another gin and tonic."

I'll also be packing this canvas J. Crew skirt, which by the look of it and the still-sewn back pockets, has never been worn:

Dreaming about warmer weather is every New Englander's birthright in the winter, even if one could hardly characterize the temperatures in Rhode Island in January as chilly (it was in the upper 50s both yesterday and today). Still, I'm traditional enough that I wouldn't consider wearing the above items now.  

So I wasn't about to walk away from this Goodwill trip without finding a couple of things to tide me over until spring. This lambswool Horny Toad sweater was new with tags and (despite the bad color of the photo) is a nice sort of heathered olive and has a contrasting pale pink along the foldover collar:

This skirt was the clear standout of the trip, however. It's in a very fine-wale corduroy, and has hot pink grosgrain detail at the top of both patch pockets and down the center.

(I admit to a soft spot for grosgrain detail, just like I love rickrack, too. I only wish that I didn't now associate rickrack more with certain girls with bangs. I love vintage clothing, but there's something a little too precious and studied about the "quirky winsome girl" aesthetic.) Anyway, the skirt:

Skirt by Anne Carson (somehow I think it's not this Anne Carson)

And here I am, badly backlit, pairing the sweater with the skirt:

What else? I turned 41 in January, and received these lovely flowers:

and this spectacular phalaenopsis orchid:

and a few wonderful books, including the glorious Indian Textiles coffee table book. I have a lot to learn, and more trips to India are clearly warranted... 

as soon as I finish that gin and tonic.


Namaste and dress well,
Kelley

*A longish footnote: on the preppy book front, I highly recommend Tad Friend's exuberant, gorgeously written Cheerful Money: Me, My Family and the Decline of Wasp Splendor. Friend is a staff writer at The New Yorker and writes brilliantly and (surprisingly) movingly about downward mobility. (Tad, if members of your extended family ever need assistance in maintaining a preppy wardrobe on a budget, I'm your girl.)

Finally, all this talk about preppies reminds me of my favorite Metropolitan Diary entry, when someone recounted a story of being on a shuttle from Manhattan to the Hamptons:

Woman passenger: Driver, there's a wasp in this van!

Male passenger: Actually, there are three of us, but we're perfectly harmless.

A Firsthand Accounting of 2011 and my Year in (Mostly Secondhand) Clothes

It was a hard year in many ways. I finished radiation treatment for my brain tumor, and had to leave the South Pacific to return to the northeastern US - to my old life. We had sublet our house (since we had expected to be gone until July 2011), so we moved into an apartment on the west side of Providence. I went back to the same office at Brown, and while there is comfort in what is familiar, there were times when I felt like I had stepped back several years in my career and that I was once again doing the very tasks I had sought to escape. Thanks, cancer.

However, I'm not one to dwell too much on the past and on what's negative. I've been tremendously blessed by love and support over this past year. My work situation may not be ideal, but I'm fortunate to have a job with terrific colleagues and with amazing health insurance that fully covers the $18K a year in MRIs that I get, as well as the consultations with my wonderful new oncologist. 

And I have more flexibility in my schedule now. I meet my daughter most days when she gets off the school bus, and for the first time in my adult life, I haven't worked full-time. That's been freeing, as was, perhaps ironically, turning 40. Between brain cancer and my (advancing) age, it's easier than ever to just not give a fuck about what people think. Last winter and spring, before I was allowed to drive again, I took the bus back and forth to work. Unless it was freezing out, I didn't wear a hat. Here's a family pic from early April (taken on the High Line in NYC). You can see that I was pretty bald:

But I didn't give a fuck. I still had my fabulous quilted orange vest, and my eBay Celine scarf, and most importantly, the two girls I love most sitting next to me. And so when punks on the bus would menacingly stare at me and my bald head, I'd stare back, thinking, What the hell are you looking at? Yeah, that's right. You think you can intimidate me? My brain tumor is far scarier than your punk-ass 15-year-old self. And once I met their gazes long enough, they'd stop staring.

This attitude also meant that it was time to stop being an apologist for my absolute love of clothes and secondhand shopping. I might be an academic, but I refuse to wear clogs and a drab palette. (Filmmaker John Waters thinks clogs are "the most offensive shoe known to man," and I am inclined to agree.) There's too much fun to be had in clothes to limit myself to wearing shades of gray... even if my worldview insists on thinking in nuances and shades of gray. I take pleasure in clothes and in textiles and design, in crafting outfits that are sometimes performative and that wink at my Fairfield County upbringing. Yes, I'm a preppy queer feminist who loves Lilly Pulitzer and Tory Burch (when I find their clothes secondhand, of course). And horse racing. In the words of Walt Whitman, "I am large, I contain multitudes."

So as 2011 draws to a close, I want to take a moment to highlight some of my favorite things this year. First, aside from the vest pictured above (and elsewhere on this blog) and my bright pants, it's also been a great year for orange accessories, although this is hardly an exhaustive inventory: 

Cuff bracelet by Leighelena, Dovecote, Westport, CT

Boiled wool felt ring, Cocoon, Istanbul, Turkey

The stunning Hermès "Voyage en Etoffes" scarf (by Annie Faivre), a Christmas gift from my generous, fun cousins

Believe it or not, however, my wardrobe does indeed extend beyond orange! Here are some of my best finds of the year:

This tunic, by Catherine Ogust, was known as the "Burma" shirt (thank you, Couture Allure Vintage Fashion blog), and probably dates from about 1970. It was in impeccable condition when I found it at Savers last summer for $4.99. Here I wear it with white Trina Turk pants (eBay), a Coach scarf (consignment), a ridiculous pair of sandals that have pink pom-poms (consignment), and a vintage pink Lucite bracelet ($1, thrift store)... plus a wonderfully bright and totally ridiculous Lilly Pulitzer bag that my friend Max bought me. 

In this ensemble I feel like I could have been an extra on the set of The Swimmer. I've never actually seen the film - although clips are available on YouTube - but it was first a fantastic John Cheever story about (what else?) anomie in suburban Connecticut. Seriously, who hasn't felt that in Fairfield County? What was it I was saying about clothing being performative? 

Another clear favorite this year was the Missoni top I found for 3 euros at a flea market in Porto Ercole, Italy, in July:

And I've found some great (non-orange) accessories, too:

Celine scarf, Savers, $4.99

Vintage leopard fur clip earrings, 25 cents, yard sale*

Vintage suede and metal belt, 25 cents, yard sale

Tod's loafers with (yes!) orange tassels, $99 but worth it, consignment store 

*Let me be clear that I would never buy nor wear new fur products. What should the ethics be of wearing vintage fur? I'm undecided. If vintage fur isn't worn, what becomes of it? Landfills? Do people bring their grandmothers' old mink stoles out to the woods and leave them to disintegrate? (I do wear leather, and I do eat meat 2-3 days a week.) All I know is that these things are complicated.

I am happy to say that I had a strong finish to my year in secondhand shopping. This nautical Kate Spade tote was $15.99 at the West Warwick Salvation Army thrift store on December 27. It needed one new $2 rivet to fix the handle. Done and done, and good as new:

Finally, the year ended on a couple of very, very bright notes: I found the vintage pink cashmere sweater at Savers last week, and on December 30, I found this Averardo Bessi top at Savers as well, along with the orange Gap Body t-shirt beneath it. Bessi was a former designer for Pucci who opened his own design house in 1950. Still, with its big bright paisleys, the resemblance to Pucci is unmistakable:

I'm hoping for a 2012 that is characterized by continued good health, published writing (I'll keep the dream alive), falling in love with new books and poetry and music and art, more snorkeling, time laughing with the people I love, seeing Lucero live (they're coming to PVD in April!), personal bests in distance and time for running, and, of course, the new and wonderful secondhand finds that will be revealed in time. 

That seems like a pretty good set of resolutions. 

Happy New Year. Love what you wear, and dress well.

Namaste,

Kelley

Indian textiles

Where to begin? For someone as obsessed with textiles, colors, and patterns as I am, India was a non-stop visual feast. This was our room at Shahpura House, a "heritage hotel," in Jaipur. We'd never before stayed anywhere with such fabulous bedlinens. 

It seemed that nearly every surface at Shahpura House was painted and carved in and with traditional Rajasthani patterns and details:

Ceiling view

Common area

Despite the fact that we were in India primarily to attend the wedding of the wonderful Gayatri Singh and Benjamin Clark, most of the photographs I took were of art and architectural details, like the above, and at City Palace in Jaipur. This is one of my favorite shots from the trip, and is of a corner:

But wait, you say: isn't this blog about clothes? Of course it is. Of course. And the shopping in India was as marvelous as I had hoped. We (I) wisely packed 2 extra bags inside our checked luggage so that we could get everything home. Here are just a few samples of clothes I bought, each representing different textile traditions from South Asia.

At FabIndia, I found this black sleeveless top which has Kashmiri-style crewelwork embroidery, which I actually wore under my wedding sari (shhh!):

At Anokhi, I bought an indigo-dye top with lovely red contrast detail on the button loops:

And at Soma, I fell in love with the circular block print designs on this top, which has a solid brown border and a jaunty cut on the bottom:

Of course, it wouldn't have been a trip to Soma without buying a bright silk chiffon block print scarf. So many times on this trip I thought, "Hooray for marigold yellow and marigold orange!" 

I also found my new favorite pants at Soma. They're more of a Western cut (I don't love the baggy drawstring thing on most Indian pants - not at 5' tall), and they're machine washable... unlike that crewelwork top and (oh god) that indigo shirt. 

Best of all, though, was when I found the little pendant painting of Ganesh at the City Palace shop in Jaipur, pictured here on the new Soma pants, because I realized that Ganesh and I were wearing THE SAME PANTS. 

There's so much more to muse about - the cultural collisions of old and new India everywhere we turned, other block prints and embroidery traditions (in which I'll bust out photos of my Bangladesh purchases from 2008), Turkish tilework from our whirlwind 36 hours in Istanbul, and a year-end roundup, but I'm going to sign off for now with one last picture, showing that there's good design in India even on matchbooks:

Namaste,

Kelley

Stay frosty

It's been five weeks since I last posted, due to a perfect storm of ongoing family health issues, the momentum of the teaching semester, and freelance work (in addition to the other things that always keep me busy). 

November in southern New England was "unseasonable." I was running in shorts some days, as it was 60 degrees outside and positively balmy. Dogwood and apple trees were blossoming. As Sam said, "This weather would be lovely if it didn't seem like a sign of the apocalypse." 

There was frost on the ground just the other day, cold enough to finally warrant a wool coat and warm hat. I love both the bright "poppy" color and the cut of this Charles Nolan coat, which I found at a consignment store. I've had the ultrasuede Alessandra Bacci hat for years - it came from Marshall's - and it's served me well through many winters. The Indian silk scarf was a gift.

Sometimes, of course, my clothing is not so much joyful as it is performative (although I'd argue that all clothes are performative, even when it's not obvious). I like to think that this outfit - especially when paired with my black leather jacket - makes me look like some version of a bad girl at a Catholic school, the kind of girl you'd cut class and smoke a joint with behind the gym (think Tammy Metzler in "Election"). 

Shirt and vest, Thomas Pink. Scarf (as tie), Hermes, on loan. 

Belt, Tommy Hilfiger, thrift store. Skirt, Berger and Mikkelson, New Zealand thrift store.

And sometimes "performative" means wearing clothes that are walking studies of colors and patterns, like this riot of black and white against the pop of a bright wool felt skirt. This mod coat was a 30th birthday gift from my dear friends John and Ester, and had belonged to John's grandmother. She must have been exactly my size, because I didn't need to have it hemmed. The knit tunic top has appeared on this blog before - it came from a flea market in Porto Ercole, Italy, and I suspect it's Missoni (it lacks a label but does have a "Made in Italy" tag inside). The bag is by Orla Kiely (a consignment store purchase), and while the pattern is of flatware, I think it also vaguely resembles a city skyline.

I aim to post more before I depart for Delhi next Saturday, but it's going to be a crazy week, with preparations for the trip, the last day of class, and, more importantly, my next MRI and followup with the oncologist. 

Here's a little autumn inspiration until my next post: pink dogwood, blooming in November, and some really gorgeous leaves from Boston (the roundish ones with the tie-dye effect are birch).

Does this mean the End Times are near? 

Until next time, Namaste, and dress well.

Kelley