The Pretty Campers Club

My daddy would have been proud. Everyone else was just stunned.

When I crawled out of the tent, my friends stopped and cocked their heads, like they had just discovered a new creature on the shores of Lake Powell in Utah. One with polkadot markings.

Or perhaps my fluffy parasol clashed with the sand, lake muck and last night's campfire smoke.
Finally, someone spoke: "You look like love child of 'The Mickey Mouse Club' and 'I Love Lucy.'"
It was true. And totally my intention.

I was wearing a red-and-white polka-dot vintage-style bathing suit from West Side Sinners in Denver (http://www.westsidesinners.com/) and an oversized white hat, in addition to the umbrella, which matched my skirt.

Sounds high maintenance. But it was quite the opposite. I had the lightest bag in the group, and I was also the only face to not get sun-fried, thanks to my double decker umbrella-hat fortress.

You see, fashion involves much more than simply putting on clothes. It spans the entire process of visual self-expression, including what you choose to use, how you use it and why. And person's fashion consciousness is amplified when condensed into a tiny duffel bag.

I have packing down to a precise equation: multi-purpose. Everything must hinge around one color and style scheme, maximizing style options and minimizing space.

For my dad, the bottom line is lightweight. He and his buddies have a club, the Rocky Mountain Titanium and High Tech Devices Backpacking Club. Because my dad worked in IT for 30 years, he insists I use the acronym RMTAHTDBC.

The RMTAHTDBC prides itself in low-weight, but not minimalist, packing. Points are awarded for the coolest devices that are invented in the garage, always involving duct tape. For example, piece of foam that quadruples as a chair, pillow, table and hat would be considered top-of-the-line couture.

Your overall pack weight earns the most points. Any pack weighing more than 35 pounds is an embarrassment. My brother's once came in at 20 pounds. Granted, he slept under the stars -- and later the hail -- without a tent, but that just elevated his style status.

Unlike my hail-beaten brother, my secondary objective for outdoor packing is to shield myself (and expensive hair dye) from said outdoors. A massive sunhat is a must, such as the wide-brim Jeanne Simmons hats for $29 at Paper Doll, 1141 Pearl St. in Boulder. My fave is the 7-inch-wide black-and-white striped wire brim hat, which comes with a matching handbag.

Some hats even boast 50 SPF and can fold into a tiny wad. Check out http://www.hatstack.com/ for more of the glory.

For a slightly smaller but still ridiculously awesome 5-inch brim hat, check out the Raffia Exotic Hat by Tropical Items Madagascar (http://www.tropicalitems.com/), a Boulder-based retailer of handmade, fair-trade crafts made in Madagascar.

A portion of all sales goes to the nonprofit Hope for Madagascar, which aims to improve the lives of the Malagasy people and their country. Find the raffia hat at Boulder and Beyond Art, 1211B Pearl St., for $39.99. It comes in 12 colors, including dusty pink.

Which just so happens to match my Lake Powell parasol and skirt.

I think I need to start my own club: The Rocky Mountain Pink Parasol and Pretty Campers Club.

Read more at www.dailycamera.com.

Reba: Home weird home

Reba is weird. I love her.

Reba's apartment is a museum of the world's most amusing flea market items. It's a gallery of conversation pieces. It is, in and of itself, a work of art.

Public speaker Patricia Fripp once said style is being yourself, but on purpose. My childhood friend Reba's home is like diving inside her beautifully mad brain and backstroking across her dreams. It's the most alive building I've ever walked through, a character. And a dangerous inspiration.

Reba's living room boasts not one, but two, sets of mannequin legs. One rests upside down between the green nightstand, barely wide enough to support her television, and Charlie McCarthy, the ventriloquist doll, who I simultaneously want to hug and set on fire.

Full-scale skeletons dance on Reba's walls year-round, along with a sad clown portrait made out of yarn, various robots, a picture of a dog in a tuxedo and an oversized landscape of a German castle. She uses old doors for picture frames and a newspaper rack for dishes.

On some street in Oregon that I forget but it was cool. Being stalked by a cardboard wolf.

 

She adorned her kitchen table -- and four mismatched chairs -- with decoupaged coffee bags, and she let her 6-year-old son, River, decorate the bottom of the table. He chose hundreds of googley eyeballs. When new people visit, Reba excitedly ushers them under the table to lie and gaze at her son's creation.

Spend 10 minutes in this apartment and you'll feel like you've known Reba for 20 years. It's the opposite of a beige Pottery Barn showroom house that could be anyone's. Reba's house couldn't
be anyone else's. That's what makes it so glorious.

I visited her in Oregon last week, and returned home to an office that had relocated from a 120-year-old station on the Pearl Street Mall to a modern business park in east Boulder. At the new desk, first I noticed the cleanliness (more than a century of newsprint, yellowed papers and journalist tears really crusts up a place). Then, I jumped out of my chair. This order was uncomfortable. My desk needed flair. And a little crust. Just enough for character.

My first reaction was to hit up one of the Pearl Street shops that I've grown addicted to over the past 10 years (gross, I'm old) at the Daily Camera. Urban Outfitters. Goldmine Vintage. But that was no longer my 'hood. I wept three tears.

I needed to trailblaze east Boulder, like Christopher Columbus blazed the Atlantic, or like Russell Brand explored every woman east of Wales.

My sense of adventure and lack of finances led me to the Salvation Army on 33rd Street. After I ran across a cookbook so ancient that it was growing a new variation of mushrooms, I knew I was home.

My house, albeit lacking eyeballs on the underside of the table, has its own energy. Obnoxiously bright walls, furniture from the 1950s and '60s and even pictures of a glittery unicorn and a hologram wolf (both gifts) (amazing). I'll never claim my house is immaculate, and I'll never pretend I'm rich. But I am proud of my odd little nest that reads about me like my own palm.

At the Salvation Army, I found records for 49 cents each. Frames for $1.30. Books for 49 cents. I almost bought three dozen Chinese literature books (for the colorful pictures of birds and mustached men), but instead, I opted for two Whitman classical books, printed in 1955. Ever blasphemous, I ripped out my favorite sketches from "Five Little Peppers" -- of a girl crying, burglars breaking into a house and a gaggle of kids writing a letter -- and I framed them.

Nearby on my desk, I hung three record covers that make me laugh, including "Sing Along with the Honkey-Tonks," and I bought an old milk pitcher to hold my pens. I found a wooden jewelry box to organize my office supplies (paper clips, sticky notes and lipsticks). I used the records to divide up my desk. The grand revamp: $8.45.

As I complete my first article in the Camera's new quarters, I feel a little greedy, like I get the best of both worlds: a modern office without asbestos flaking into my tea, and a little old-fashioned weirdness, to remind me of where we came from.

I even decorated the underside of my desk, in honor of River. Feel free to peek under there. The carpet's clean of journalist sludge.



At least for now.

Attention: You can stop searching for beauty now

Photo by Iman Woods Creative

My relentless pursuit of beauty has kept me from showering for an embarrassing number of days now.

This isn't some statement of societal rebellion or a social experiment. I haven't had a moment to spare because I've been trying to write myself a love letter.

Not easy.

Turns out, my subconscious is addicted to lying to itself, insistent upon pretending that I am weak, broken, ugly and somehow not enough. And as it turns out, those aren't the ingredients for a very good love letter.

Women are weird. We desire at our deepest core to be considered beautiful. Yet we refuse to admit that we already are. We (choose to) identify with our pains and insecurities, while waiting for someone else to tell us that one thing that we need to hear in order to finally acknowledge our worth. We play the (silently resentful) martyr to look strong, we slice up our faces to look pretty, we compete with people who are nothing like us to look accomplished. We chisel away at who we are in an ironic attempt to feel whole.

What if -- and this is a bizarre shot in the dark here, so bear with me -- what if we told ourselves whatever it is that we are trying so desperately to wring out of the world? What if we wrote a love letter to ourselves, saying exactly what we need to hear?

Gasp. That would make too much sense.

An Erie woman is leading an effort to try to encourage other women to do just this. The Inner Beauty Project started after 30-year-old Iman Woods wrote a letter to herself to help cope with post-partum depression. The experience was so empowering that she launched a Web site (theinnerbeautyproject.com) and created a contest to try to encourage other women to write their own letters.

I met Woods, who is a photographer, when I was the editor of Women's Magazine. She introduced herself as a "girl in search of true beauty." Which is, incidentally, also my bio. Then, we both found out we were pregnant in the same week. And we both ended up with premature babies and post-partum depression.

If you meet certain people for a reason, God wasn't being very subtle with this one.

Now, Woods has launched a project based on the belief that "true beauty shines brightest in darkness," and my personal search for beauty has been focused down to one single point on the World Wide Web. I find myself reading and re-reading the letters that local women have written to themselves, as if they were written to me.

You have wrinkles now, your hair is getting gray, and your teeth are not as white as they used to be. Yet, you are more beautiful now than ever before. Did you hear me?
You are more beautiful now, than ever before.
Your beauty lies within your capacity for love, the courage, integrity and determination you show -- not the length of your eyelashes, or the size of your thighs. 


I find myself floored by the stories of strength, and then shocked that these amazing women would still have feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, even though I do it, too.

You need to stop beating yourself up over this. You couldn't have stopped it because you didn't know it was happening. She couldn't tell you, she was too small, just 12-weeks-old and he did his best to hide it. What you need to remember are the promises you made to Jasmine that day in the hospital, the day she died.
I find myself saddened by letter after letter from women saying they had never thought to do this for themselves, and that after so many years of fighting their own various battles, they could finally hear words that brought them some kind of peace.

All of our lives, women are sent one basic message: Self-criticism is the way to self-improvement. Deep down, we all know this isn't true, but the lesson runs deep and the pattern is difficult to break.

It can be broken, one woman at a time, one voice at a time. Each of us needs to stand up for the one person who we are most under obligation to protect. That person is ourselves. By learning to embrace who we are, recognize what we have accomplished, and know we can carve out our own futures, we can escape the viciousness of self-criticism and self-loathing.

Iman's Inner Beauty Project is celebration of not just what we can be, but who we already are.
And finally, even though my "love letter" might always be a work in progress, I have begun to hear my inner voice soothing my anxieties. It keeps telling me that I am strong, healed, beautiful and more than enough. And the craziest thing is: It's totally telling the truth. I might even start believing it, one of these days.

My voice also keeps telling me something else: That my hunt for beauty is over.

I guess I should add that to my love letter, and bcc Iman Woods.

'50s style goes to my head

My grandma washes her hair once a week. I now understand why.

I am recovering from a bouffant.

My mother-in-law turned 50 on Saturday. In celebration, we held her a ’50s-theme party, complete with an inflatable juke box, retro record decorations and sloppy joes from Barbecue Bob’s (yeah, I wasn’t quite sure how that fit in either, but no one complained – except me when I sloppy joed on my white apron. Yes, apron. Read on).

In typical overboard Heckel manner, my mom and I decided to get our hair professionally “did” at a Loveland salon, Serenity Hair Designs.

Four hours later, we fox-trotted out with flippy ends and roots ratted toward the heavens. My bouffant incorporated a thick headband. My mom’s: a droopy white bow. She rocked the bobby socks and canvas shoes, a swing skirt, pearls and a pink polka-dot scarf.

I accented my white eye shadow with a pleated, June Cleaver button-up dress and square-toed buckle shoes. I added a white apron for the funny factor (I don’t know how to serve cookies even if they come straight from the Safeway bakery).

I thought my costume was totally the cat’s pajamas.

Until several days later – still scraping the hairspray out of my locks – I stumbled upon www.fiftiesweb.com and learned my look was entirely ’60s. The fifties were soft, feminine and curly. No blow dryers and tangle towers.

Golly, if I’d known that then, maybe I could comb through my hair today.

I blame the inspiration for pouf-head on my gramma, who to this day sleeps in a satin cap as to not disturb her stiff hair-cocoon. She gets her tresses washed and formed at the parlor every Saturday. (By Friday afternoons, she’s usually reaching for a fork or candle snuffer to itch her scalp without disturbing the ‘fro.)

And after hours of cooking under the astronaut-helmet hair-dryer, I don’t blame her for trimming her beauty routine to a weekly affair.

Of course, unlike mine did, my gramma’s ‘do looks timelessly stunning. I can’t imagine her with any other style. It’d throw my world off axis, like when your teacher gets a bad haircut or when my dad shaved off his beard after 21 years.

Some styles should never change. And could it be that everything comes back in style if you just wait long enough?

Tell that to the poor kid at McDonald’s who was too confused to give me my soda on Saturday.
My husband was supposed to pick me and my mom up from the hair place, but he couldn’t find it. I sucked down a Diet Coke in about 8 seconds and therefore needed another one, so we told him to meet us under the nearby big yellow arch.

By how he scowled at me, I’d say the cash-register kid didn’t appreciate my ensemble. I wanted to grab him by the ears and ask him if his mama didn’t teach him no manners. That lil’ whippersnapper looked about 10 years old, anyway. Don’t know what they’re doing hiring toddlers. And the only straws left were too short for my cup. I almost asked for my 79 cents back.

Oh, heavens. My gramma’s hair has gone to my head.

Photo by Iman Woods.

Devon: You can't party without a party dress

God (or my mother's uterus) never gifted me a sister.

I tried to whittle little brother Nathan into the shape of a female, duct-taping him to the kitchen chair and attacking him with a curling iron and Aqua Net. But eventually, puberty stole his smooth cheeks and blessed him with muscles with which to punch me. I had to find a new life-sized doll to play with.

This one didn't squirm.

Her name was Devon, and I found her in middle school. Devon was the King Midas of fashion. She could transform sweatpants into haute couture with the wave of her Coach bag. Ever since she was a pre-teen -- while the rest of us were wearing mismatched breasts, slightly-too-hairy-but-too-young-to-shave legs and blue eyeliner three awkward centimeters above our lash lines -- Devon was halting traffic and derailing trains with her glamour.

Barbie's hair looks like scraggly meth-fuzz next to Devon's locks: thick, always lustrous and never flat. Her hair actually grows out of her head in perfect curls, just like her nails sprout from her fingers in shiny red, never chipped. She was born with a strand of shiny pearls around her neck. Her legs wax themselves. Sephora designs its make-up collections around Devon's palette, and bottles her natural scent to sell as perfume.

Devon is legendary. She's Paul Bunyanette.

Especially with regards to her Party Dresses. (Yes, these warrant their own proper nounage.)

Devon has a Party Dress for every occasion, even the fake holidays like President's Day and National Cement Between The Bricks Awareness Day. She shows up to gatherings with extra accessories to disperse to the paltry style-peasants (like yours truly) who didn't have the fashion foresight to design a full seasonal line with three costume changes in honor of the occasion. In fact, my favorite green sunnies were a Devon-distributed party favor on St. Patty's Day (as well as the only reason I didn't get pinched, because God knows green isn't my power color).

Seeing that Devon has no fewer than three special Party Dresses designated for the day after the day after her second cousin's birthday, try to imagine, if your mind can even stretch this far without pulling a neurotransmitter, the kind of glory that adorns my friend's body on New Year's Eve.

Try. Now weep.

Norman Hartnell, eat your hart (sp.) out.

(He was the Queen's dressmaker of the '40s-50s. You would know that if you were Blue Blood or Devon.)

It's a (non-blood) family tradition that we dance in the New Year's together, and of course, Devon had her New Year's Party Dress six months ago. Equally of course, it wasn't until I could count the final hours of 2010 on two feet that I realized I had nothing to wear to the ball, Cinderella.

With no time for shenanigans, I hit up a store that looks strikingly similar to my sister's closet, quite possibly the world's best dress store: Violette Boutique, 1631 Pearl St. in Boulder, violetteboulder.com.

A month ago, Violette expanded to open another store across the street, Lilli. The latter offers the "casual side of chic," with jeans, casual shirts, a wider range of sizes and a special section in the back of little girl's tutus. Each dressing room has its own theme (cowgirl, Eastwick, pink retro).

Part of the reason to open Lilli, according to the owners (a mother, daughter and grandmother team): to clear out more room to make Violette fluffier, floofier and dressier.

Yes.

Lillie St. Germain, the grandmother, helped me sift through the tulle to find five fave last-minute New Year's little black dresses from which to choose, or line up for a five-point costume change.

1. Little black sexy. This dress, with thick straps crossing on the upper back, is form-fitting, hott (with two t's) and fun, $48.

2. Timeless and forgiving. This one is more demure, with pleats and a lace bottom that flatters any body shape, $115. Cinch with a sparkly belt.

3. Chanel who? This Chanel knockoff is black with white lace pocket detailing and scattered black sequins, $85. It's fashionable, hip and a little modest, too.

4. A comfortable corset. This dress is made out of soft cotton, with an off-white lace accent print, but it's super sexy with a black corset top and zipper, $84.

5. Don't buy this because I'm wearing it. This dress looks retro '50s with a fitting top and flowing A-line skirt, perfect for twirling, $88. Now add a little toughness with a thick gold zipper on the back, permanently unzipped to the waist, and a matching front zipper that you can zip as high as you want (or increasingly lower, corresponding to the amount of champagne you consume).

The instant I saw this dress, I knew it was me: a little old fashioned, a little over the line. Why did it have to be one of the most expensive dresses in a shop known for its low price points? In a tizzy, I text-attacked Devon.

Me: I found the perfect party dress, but it's too expensive. I need it.

Me: Please help me cope with this hardship.

Me: I am mourning it not being on my body at all times.

Me: Dear Devon, I want it. Love Sis.

Finally, the response floated in, as if on a Magic Eight Ball.

Devon: Dear Aims, the heart wants what the heart wants. Love Sissy.

Which is exactly why everyone needs a good sister: Unconditional condonation.