spring wrap-up, wrap-out

It is spring. Finally spring arrives and we quickly forget the long and bitter winter, praying that the spring and the summer will usher in something new, something positive. I can say that I love to see the beautiful women suddenly reappear, no longer hidden beneath layers and layers of clothing and fat coats, but to see them, as I see me too, morph into something completely otherwise - strappy shoes, spring silk dresses, loose underthings, slips and silks (if they like me, value what it means to be truly feminine, an almost lost notion, I think that is slowly slipping into an almost art-form).

I have long valued both the feminist and my femininity and never seen them as contradictory. One can be a radical feminist and still wear and want hand-made lace slips from Paris; it doesn't make your intellectual points any less valid. What you wear is, and should be, a reflection of who you are. I do not let others "choose" clothes for me - and despite having worked at a top fashion magazine (Vogue) I remain largely uninfluenced by contemporary standards of so-called beauty, because I live in the backward era, I think, still in the forties (tho I was never there) most of my clothes hail from that era because of a friend whose aunt passed away and left me all of her clothes, that were not in her size.

Why she didn't buy clothes in her right size - a larger size - says something right there about how we are "supposed" to be and how we are perceived. In this case, I benefited and am grateful, but in some sense sadly so, although if my friends aunt could see her clothes now, she would no doubt be happy that someone is wearing her white gloves, her beautiful net hair-snoods (yes, I said snood) and hats, carrying her suede-lined handbags, walking about with the light flutter at the hem of a katydid green dress. If you can pull that off, if you can do that in today's society then it is more than style, but it is about you and who you are. You may or may not stand out, likely one does, but not in some "art girl" way, or any other type, because you refuse all typecasts by being true to yourself and your own taste.

None of this means that I do not wear my Bob Dylan t-shirt with an old pair of Levi's and my cousin's gift of a hat that says "Bronx Baseball" or his Yankees cap. I still do... and they look good. I wear them, as I often wear my dresses, with a pair of Converse slip-ons and that makes all of the difference. He once told me, It is the contrast that makes the sex-appeal and I would agree with that.

Try to be sexy and you will almost certainly fail for there are a million other girls in exactly the same, let's face it, "uniform", and you look no different from the rest. You may "fit in" but is that all you want from life? To fit in? Or do you want to stand apart from the crowd and be glowing and glorious in the moment and more, memorable. I don't see anyone else wearing snoods and white gloves, yet i get more compliments on these things, on me as a whole person, precisely because they are different. What's more, one sees a feminine woman and doesn't expect the candor for which I am known because perhaps this is too forward but here again, it is precisely this contrast that makes it work. So work it...

I'm tired of seeing women - and men - but down. I'm bored with the 'metrosexual' and i was bored with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie years ago and don't see either of them as particularly chic, but instead as cookie cutter versions of what I expect to see on a red-carpet. Paris Hilton is still up to her old tricks, and Nicole Richie looks better because she lost weight and the awful hair extensions that clashed with the rest of her hair, but one senses that both of those things had more to do with a lack of self-confidence; i'll certainly give her her due for now having that confidence and acquiring a certain elegance that far surpasses that of her (ex) friend, Paris, who remains in my mind, essentially what she became known for in the first place - her internet video that is what really made her known. Not her modeling, for she was never particularly good at that, nor stood out the way some models do and have (Kate Moss, for example). No, Paris Hilton will always be the "party girl". Boring. I'm bored. If you're bored, stop reading now.

My point to young women, and even older women, women of any age, is to simply Be. Be not just yourself, but transcend yourself; be beautiful in the moment, try to eke out joy, for life is full of too much pain and you must realize that the moments in which things seem "calm" are always an opportunity for joy. That joy lies not with another person - as I recently and mistakenly thought - believing I could be only joyful with "him" what I realized, what a friend helped me realize, was that joy is and always has been inherent in me; it was yes, brought forth by him and that is no small feat and that symbiosis I doubt I will ever feel again. Maybe that's okay. Most of the time, it doesn't feel okay, but again, life can be difficult and you cannot regain yesterday no matter how much you may want to. It's gone. Nor can you carry forward what another cannot, for myriad reasons, carry forward even if they wish to themselves. Alas, not everyone is like me, or even like you; not everybody will stand up for what they believe in.

Me, I fought and would fight for that relationship still. But I cannot force another to fight the good fight. If one wants to cower in the corner, afraid of a bully, and that is what we are talking about here - a real bully - then who am I to say "jump". It may be the right thing to do, the right thing indeed may be escape and to my mind, he'd be happier and better off running a small chicken farm and other things he or we dreamed of and spoke of. In the final account, he may have meant every word. A lot of people mean what they say and yet they never follow through. Following through takes courage and to some degree, a certain lack of guile and naivte. You have to have faith and take the Ontological leap even if it doesn't always make sense because you have to believe that in the final account, it will make sense. In short, you have to be brave, you have to have courage, for love is the domain of the courageous. A coward, Gandhi said, can never truly love and he was right and this applies to this day. So watch who you spend your time with...

One cannot control the heart, the inner-workings of the mind and love does warp the mind more than a little. We become by turns someone else, we become an amalgam of something else as we mix and blend with another person and share a certain symbiosis that is not to be found elsewhere. I think perhaps this happens only once, and once it is gone, it is gone. This whole "there are many fish in the sea" is true, but it's also crap. Yes, there are many fish in the sea, but can you really, to stretch the metaphor, swim with them; is the cadence the same? If you do not naturally fall in step with another, perhaps it is time to give up the ghost. Or even if you did fall in step and they veered off because of some "STOP" sign, then so be it. They are living in a state of stuck, as someone once put it. I don't want to be there.

To be honest, the warm weather doesn't help me much, but neither did the bitter winter. The winter was empty and hollow and the warm weather is a reminder of what was. I smell privet and think of slow, meandering walks - the long way home. I think of silver-grey viaducts. I think of certain songs. I think a lot... and I try not to, but on some level, perhaps I know it is better to think it through (read: not obsess) but to truly think things through so that you grow as a person, even if the other didn't. There may be no lessons to be learned, not for you anyway. You may have done everything right and been glorious and beautiful and fabulous and as Nelson Mandela said, Who are you not to be? Your playing small doesn't serve the world any... and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same.

He was right. I let my light shine and for a while, someone else let their light shine back and I - a fool and yes, naive - took to it as a beacon in the night steering me clear of the rocks when really all it did was draw me to the rocks were I pounded hard against the sea-wall. Sometimes there is nothing to be learned.

I would rather live as I do - risks, naive, guileless, gullible, and in many ways, love like a child because that is the only way I know how to love. Fully and completely, diving headlong into the cool waters where I break water ceilings and see the crystalline drops shining in the sunlight as I emerge, glowing and going and going and going.

All of this by way of saying that perhaps the change is not necessarily necessary on your part, but the change is required of some other or society or an industry and that you are just fine as you are. That being yourself is the best you can be if you allow yourself, if you give yourself permission, to simply be yourself... this is key. Don't forget it.

You can sit Shiva for as long as you want, mourn if you need to, move to Italy and get a job as a professional mourner and cry until you think the tears won't come anymore but they come and come and come, but at least you'll be paid for it and be honoring the dead. In short, put whatever it is you feel to some use... much as I write this now, I know not whether anyone will care, see it, relate, hate, etc. or think pissy pithy thoughts and it doesn't matter if they do think the latter. What really counts is that if I have reached that one person who can relate, then my work is done. I know this and I know whereof I speak, both fortunately and unfortunately.

I heed the roadsigns, but I still drive. As C.S. Lewis said wisely about life, "You play the hand you're dealt; in the end, I still think the game is worthwhile."

Thanks for listening,

s.r.p.