Pack Light

When my girlfriend Judy half-joked "I don't know, maybe that's what broke up my marriage..." the that to which she was referring wasn't any of the usual suspects like money, infidelity or the gradual growing apart which can cause couples to say "I don't." Instead, it was her baggage. Or, to be more precise, her excess baggage.

"Bag lady you gone hurt your back

Dragging all them bags like that

I guess nobody ever told you

All you must hold on to

Is you

Is you

Is you"

-Erykah Badu

Photography Courtesy of Gilles Bensimon

When I think of Judy two things invariably come to mind: air and light. Which is why it came as a shock to learn that she was a Bag Lady. And I'm talking hard core. As in the time she hauled eight pieces of luggage to Prague and Budapest on a ten-day getaway and wound up having to ship her Duty Free purchases home because there wasn't enough room in any of her (did I mention, eight?!) bags to get the job done.

To be fair, Judy comes by her predilections honestly. An executive in the beauty business, her appearance is her calling card and in order to succeed she has to look the part at all times. Judy's pretty face and statuesque frame were a gift from the genetic lottery, but even she can't roll out of bed looking like the One Percenter from the Fortune 100 Club that she is without a little help from the hair, makeup, wardrobe and accessories department. And while she is as adept at pulling together a look that conveys "I got this" in business as she is at contract negotiations & client relations; the very assets which have bolstered Judy's success in Gotham become a liability when she takes her show on the road.

If we are lucky enough to travel for leisure, we can do one of two things when determining what to wear while away from home: dress to impress or seek to be impressed by the places we visit. It goes without saying that the former has its charms. But unless one is Lady Mary from Downton Abby traveling with one's personal butler, valet (non-silent "T", thank you veddy much), maid and footman to unpack one's steamer trunks upon arrival-- it might be more prudent to pack light and enjoy the ride.

Make no mistake, I am not saying a lady should morph into a frumposaurus just because she is on vacation. But she should be ready to get-up-and-go without being a drag on her travel companions... or poor, unsuspecting husband who finds himself schlepping her bags and mentally Czeching out.

To wit: my two-cents on putting your best foot forward without packing 12 pairs of shoes and a blow dryer.  

Photography Courtesy of Naina Williams

As it happens, the feet are an excellent place to start! 

I once knew an art director at a fashion magazine who would reject an otherwise perfect photograph for publication if the model's nails looked unkempt. Naturally, he was a Frenchman. And he was right. What he taught me was that the most powerful tool in any woman's arsenal is her polish --in the literal and figurative sense. So while I'd encourage you to leave home without the Jimmy Choo's in order to conserve space, I would also insist that you treat yourself to a manicure and pedicure before taking flight. Then flaunt your pretty feet in one or two pairs of flat sandals that can carry you from day to night without taking up too much room in your carry-on bag.

Of course, there is no more effective buzz kill than corns and hammer toes on display for all the world to see. So consider covering up if your feet aren't going to take any Best in Show prizes in 2012. And try to remember that the best way to minimize any further wear & tear on your tootsies is by wearing shoes with good support that don't impede your stride. Nikes are so perfectly suited for the job that they've become synonymous with the American tourist. But why make the cobblestones cringe as you trip the light fantastic through Dubrovnik in what look like marshmallows for the feet when far more elegant solutions abound?

Trainers like the Thoung Dihn from Vietnam (http://www.thuongdinh.com/), pictured below, are appropriate whether you find yourself in town or country... dressed up or down... running through an airport or on a treadmill at your hotel gym (though why anyone would do this to themselves while on vacation is a mystery to me). Sneakers like these also collapse easily for packing-- helping you stick to your new one bag policy when traveling.

Yes, Judy. I said one bag and I am talking to you!

The images above and below are my two all-time favorite vacation snapshots. Up top are my Aunt Frances and Aunt Barbara-- likely enjoying a day on Lake Michigan in the 60's. And that's my sister Dee Dee looking like a Prada-esque wood nymph on holiday in Ibiza last spring. What all three women have in common is the way they've cleverly deployed a simple scarf to boost their individual style-quotients exponentially. 

Photography Courtesy of Michel Malausséna

Equal parts practical and frivolous: scarves are my favorite way to add color to a neutral wardrobe, feminize boyish tailoring and make a bad hair day better. The longer & lighter the better because then your scarf can actually flutter in the wind.  And what could be more girly than that?! Scarves are also a godsend when confronted with one of those those sketchy looking chairs you'd really prefer not to sit in while wearing a short dress or shorts  on vacation. I always have an extra one on hand for this purpose exclusively, and can't tell you how grateful other women have been when I loan them my scarf to for this very purpose. Whatever the case, scarves offer maximum impact with minimum space requirements to comply with those pesky FAA regulations for in-flight luggage.

Sense a theme here?

Good, because that brings me the third rail of travel for women: hair... and what to pack when you feel pressed to look salon-perfect. Black women, and any of my sisters with so-called "unruly" hair, you know I'm talking to you so listen up!

 We all know how much physical and psychic space is sucked up when traveling with blow dryers, curling irons, rollers, gels, hairsprays and whatever other contraptions needed to keep our tresses bouncin' and behavin', but can we just give ourselves a break from that twisted routine while we are on vacation? In the first place, your already stressed out hair could use the reprieve from all that heat and product. And, secondly, is there anything more fetching than a woman who holds her head high even if every hair is not in place? 

As I see it, vacation hair is to the great outdoors what bed hair is to the boudoir: sexy and underrated. So why not rock yours the next time you take off and see what happens? Best case, you will fall in love with what your mama gave you. Worst case, you can use your trusty scarf to cover up... then curse me out when you come home. But my guess is that something bigger will happen as you cross paths with other women on their journeys who will admire your vacation hair and think to themselves "Next time I think I'll have what she's having."

Photography Courtesy of Maria Trice-Jones

As you've gathered by now, it is impossible to change ingrained habits without changing our minds first. I could go on an on about the benefits of the one-bag rule while, but Judy put it best when she described her way of doing things as "burdensome." She was inspired to change her ways when I sent her this picture of my week's wardrobe for Florida-- where I'm spending time with my family.

I swear on my mother's head that every item pictured below fit in this one messenger bag. A bag, by the way, which did double duty as my daytime carryall from Key West to Coral Springs. All of the garments were rolled as opposed to folded-- an old flight attendant's trick-- which really maximizes space. 

The cream colored J. Crew "City Fit" pants (I loooove them for feeling comfy without looking slouchy), white denim leggings, cuffed shorts (in white and gray) and navy stretch skirt covered my bottom half nicely, while fitted tees with 3/4 sleeves (in pale, navy & cerulean blue) took care of my top half whether dressed up or down by day or night. The green floral print tunic was worn solo as a dress, or paired with the white leggings for more coverage. The same for the fuchsia sundress. And the striped tee worked with every bottom pictured.The other essentials were my flip flops, toiletries in the dreaded clear Ziploc bag, laptop, iPad, chargers, comb, wallet, hand lotion, lip balm, and crocheted purse stuffed with a 7-day supply of Hanky Pankys. If you look closely you'll notice a pair of yoga pants just beneath the sundress-- which were paired with my tees (after wearing them once) to eliminate the need to pack gym tees for early morning bike rides with my mother. I wore white jeans, a plaid cotton shirts and trainers on the plane, with my beloved kikoy (a traditional woven cotton scarf from Kenya http://www.kikoyshop.com/collections/regular-kikoys) wrapped around my neck to stave off the air conditioning in the airport terminal and aboard my flight.

My family is laid back, so I didn't bring any heels with me on this trip. But had I chosen to,  it would have been a neutral strappy sandal that would disappear on my foot, thereby elongating my legs while coordinating with any of my neutral outfits.

I admit that I'm an extreme packer when it comes to streamlining, but there has never been a time that I found myself sartorially challenged while away from home. The trick is to make decisions at the outset ("I refuse to be a slave to fashion" would be a damn good start, followed by "If it don't fit, I don't need it.") and then stick to them.

My sage advice and packing tips aside, the one thing I want Judy to remember next time she packs a bag is that everything she needs to have the perfect vacation is already within, so "All you must hold on to is you, is you, is you"... just like Erykah sang and Gabby Douglas showed all of us in London.

Illustration Courtesy of Alvaro www.alvaroartz.com

Failing that, Judy, just make the #1 Rule of water skiing your default setting when packing:

"Let go or be dragged."

-Zen Proverb

Bon Voyage!

Climbing the Corporeal Ladder

When a hospital staffer inspires comparisons to Nurse Ratched this is not a good thing-- as anyone who has seen "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" can tell you.

Jack Nicholson's character R.P. McMurphy encountered his nemesis on the ward of an insane asylum in the iconic 70's flick. I crossed paths with her doppelgänger two years ago at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta. 

My Nurse Ratched was the technician who happened to be on duty the day I got my first bone density test. The procedure was as straightforward as a CT scan, and concluded with a computer-generated printout consisting of random numbers. I had no frame of reference for what the numbers meant, so I asked the technician if she could explain their significance. And that's when Little Miss Sunshine mumbled something about my bones being average... for a woman of my age... followed by her glass-half-empty prognosis of "It's all downhill from here, anyways!"

Really???

Suppressing an urge to bark, "Gee, is this what passes for bedside manner these days?!", I bit my tongue, snatched my paperwork and made a beeline for the exit before my inner-grammarian could lecture that "anyway" was an adverb, and adverbs could not be plural, thus there was no such word as "anyways".

But I digress...

Under normal circumstances, my exiting a health care facility with the velocity of a bat out of hell would not raise any eyebrows. I'm a germaphobe, and my idea of a bad time is hanging out anyplace where staph infections might thrive. But on this particular day, the contaminant that set off the Code Red alert in my head was that insidious strain of thinking which equates getting older with a slide into nothingness. Nurse Ratched's parting shot was the tell that indicated her status as a carrier. 

In hindsight, I guess I'll never know if she meant any harm that day. Who knows what her elders had been preaching since Baby Ratched first crawled out of her bassinet? Maybe she'd fallen victim to the not-so-subtle social cues that tell all of us "it's all downhill from here after we turn 30, or 40 (or whatever the hell the new 20 is supposed to be). Certainly, her sensible, beige, rubber-soled shoes; I-don't-give-a-damn halo of a coif; and perma-pinched expression did little to attenuate my belief that Elvira had left the building many moons ago. Maybe my self-appointed Oracle of Doom & Gloom just wanted to give me the 411 on aging lest I sally forth under the false impression that growing old would be child's play.

Whatever the case, if given the chance to do it all again I would have patted down the quills of my ego, challenged Nurse Nasty's assumptions about the trajectory of me and my lovely bones, and encouraged her to bone up on 19th-century German philosophy.

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

-Friedrich Nietzsche

The fear of aging is the abyss of our time and culture. In the process, far too many of us are wasting our youth thinking we're old as we anticipate uncharted territory and assume the worst. 

This theory first occurred to me when my brown-eyed, dark-haired, South American friend Sylvia told me how birthdays "depressed" her. Nothing new about this lament, I know. But what makes my friend unique is that she confided her fear when we were freshmen in high school. Apparently, Sylvia's turning ten-- or "crossing into the double-digits" as she put it-- was what tripped her panic buttons.

My own experience as a model left me with a motherlode of tales from the front lines of gerontophobia: from the well-meaning fashion photographer who encouraged me to lie about my age (because being 23 could prove detrimental to a mannequin's wealth), to the bloodsport that passed for entertainment in make up rooms from New York to Paris-- where  the super models who'd preceded me were judged mercilessly, by former colleagues, for having had the temerity to turn 30.

Eventually, I came to understand that the fashionable set had nothing on the civilian population, as they too were marching to the same sad drummer: savaging themselves in the process.

I've seen 40-something friends freak out over gray hairs; 50-something friends cry over laugh lines; and 60-something friends look back on images of their 50-something selves and marvel at "how young and beautiful I was back then."

In each instance, it occurred to me that the only thing "old" about any of my beautiful friends was their attitudes. My personal measure of beauty, after all, has always been the twinkle in one's eye as opposed to the tautness of one's ass, but try telling that to someone whose self-regard is directly related to their body parts.  

When Bette Davis said "Old age is no place for sissies", I know she spoke from experience. Far be it from me to question the wisdom of any diva who survives the slings & arrows of aging out of ingenue roles in Hollywood. But if we don't get our minds right and consciously reconsider the myths and misconceptions we have internalized about aging-- that which is destined to be a bumpy ride will certainly morph into the highway from hell. And since clicking our heels three times and going back to Kansas ain't exactly an option, would it kill us to walk the walk with courage, fortitude and grace? 

My mother's generation are masters at this art. They use genteel terms like "aches & pains" to describe any afflictions associated with climbing the corporeal ladder; while we Boomers have gone hog wild with our wall-to-wall talk of high cholesterol, hot flashes and incontinence wherever and whenever we please. 

A) That's just not cool. B) Your age-related breakdowns are not nearly as interesting to others as they are to you. And C) If we, as children, were spared the play-by-play on exactly what can malfunction as one grows older then why have we not passed on the favor to our youngin's? Call me old fashioned, but when a ten-year-old is well-versed in the argot of a pharmaceutical sales rep, I think that's kind of creepy. Erectile dysfunction, anyone?

Have you ever visited one of those tourist sites where climbing a ridiculously high number of steps is part of the attraction? The kind of place where the staircase is spiral and the quarters are cramped, dark and poorly ventilated? Perhaps, like the rest of us, your visit happened to fall on the kind of summer day where the thermometer reads "¡No Mas!" 

Whatever the season, such climbs are an apt metaphor for getting older: where we are as likely to meet a fellow traveler who'll inspire us on the way up, as we are to be brought down by draughting behind all the wrong people.

Where do you fall in the scheme of things?

Are you the climber who embraces the challenge without complaint or breaking a sweat, even if the going gets tough, with a spring in your step?

Might you be more of an average joe who ascends in fits and starts, complaining the entire way and whining "How much longer till we get to the top?!" every time you encounter someone on the descent?

Or, are you the irritant who feels compelled to count each and every step out loud, no matter where you are on the trek? You know the one I'm talking about. The one who imposes their bad attitude on everyone within earshot as they huff & puff "Four hundred and sixty-five! ... Four hundred and sixty-six! ... Four hundred and sixty-seven! ... Four hundred and sixty-eight!" as if the rest of us can't count. 

Don't be that person.

Don't sheepishly accept anybody else's paradigms on what life is supposed to look and feel like as you grow older. 

Photography Courtesy of Gilles Bensimon

Don't lose perspective and overlook an inch of any view while you're lucky enough to be on the journey-- no matter what the signs say.

Photography Courtesy of Gilles Bensimon

Don't be cavalier about the caliber of company you keep along the way.

And if anybody ever tells you "It's all downhill from here, anyways!": channel Mick Jagger as you instruct them to get off of your cloud... 

Photography Courtesy of Gilles Bensimon

... before soaring higher in search of like-minded rockers.