An Aries (Who Knows Some Stuff)
Congratulations to designer markgharris for his winning design. If you missed the judges’ vicious viscous snarky commentary on this week’s designs, you MUST read here.
Here’s Figaro modeling the winning design:
And here’s timothyjlambert‘s design looking pretty awesome on Nikki.
Then there’s Summer, who’s apparently a dowdy hooker with underarm issues wearing shoes from the bath supplies wall at Everything’s A Dollar. Whee!
The challenge for week five of Bravo TV’s Project Runway was to find a design that would take Brooke Shields’ character, Wendy Healy, of NBC’s Lipstick Jungle, from being a high-powered movie executive by day, to socializing with her husband at night.
LJ Runway Monday’s Heidi Gunn gave designers Timothy J. Lambert, Mark G. Harris, and me–Becks!–the same challenge. And now the judges will decide…
Let me say that if I did not have this thing right here:
I would join the witness protection program and vanish to a place where no LJ Runway Monday producer or judge could ever find me.
A few years after my father died in 1985, I began doing a lot of painting. That is not where my talent lies by any means, but I didn’t do it because I think I’m a good artist. Painting put me in a deeply meditative state in which I felt a soul connection to my father, who was an artist. I enjoyed making color choices and figuring out artists’ tools and methods by trial and error. At one point, someone suggested that I take art classes. I’m sure I would have learned a lot, but painting isn’t my passion or how I’m driven to create. It’s just my way of keeping some paternal energy flowing.
I know that Runway Monday wasn’t conceived to help me find a way to work through grief, but it does have that effect. My mother sewed, and I’m not only making use of her sewing supplies (many of which amuse me because they are from my old home ec class–she saved the oddest things), but I find that it gives me the same kind of connection to her that painting gave me to my father. I can remember so many things she sewed, and I also get to mirror her frustration when I do something stupid and end up ripping out seams and muttering under my breath. (This makes the dogs leave the room, poor things.)
The greatest gift my parents gave me was my love of words and reading. But it’s comforting to occasionally dabble in their talents, too. My mother would be entertained by these outfits Mark, Tim, and I are making for dolls. However, she’d definitely shake her head that I’m sitting here sewing while that tuft of dog hair drifts across my kitchen floor. Housekeeping is not nearly as fun as sewing can be.
On a somewhat connected note, FARB, if you read this, know that I’m thinking of you.
Congratulations to timothyjlambert and his winning design! Read what the judges had to say about all the designs and the winner here. Thank you Heidi Gunn and our fabulous judges for all your hard work. And sympathies to my fellow loser designer, markgharris.
On Bravo’s Project Runway, the contestants were challenged to create a women’s wear look for an athlete to wear during the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics. The design should project the image of the U.S. to the world and make the athlete feel proud to represent her country.
LJ’s Heidi Gunn gave the Runway Monday designers the same challenge.
If you’re not afraid to go near the water, the judging snark for LJ Runway Monday has begun right here with the sharp-tongued Miranda Priestly.
And I’m not allowed to defend my design because I’m BACK STAGE watching Timothy stretch and Mark mysteriously vanish.
Somewhere, my mother is smiling that smug smile that ONLY mothers can smile with such maddening motherness.
When I was growing up, my mother whipped up curtains, throw pillows, dresses for Debby and me, skirts and dresses for herself, and yep, even Barbie clothes, on this old brown Singer sewing machine. At some point when her children were gone and she had more disposable income, she bought herself a new machine. My sister was not allowed near anything that plugged in–she was the Grim Reaper to small appliances–and even though I’d been banned from the Singer for breaking too many needles sewing shit on my blue jeans in high school, she gave me the sewing machine.
I hauled that thing around through college and graduate school, never using it, and at some point, I donated it to Goodwill. I didn’t realize that it was one in a long line of what we call “Mother Gifts”: that is, she gave them to us, but still considered them hers. When she found out the machine was gone, she was aghast:
You gave away MY sewing machine?
Well, no, it was MY machine. You gave it to me.
Not to give away! I’d have taken it back. That was the best machine I ever owned.
Who knew?
I don’t sew, so recently, when we emptied her apartment, I wasn’t inclined to hold on to her latest sewing machine, even though Tom and I had it reconditioned and repaired for her at Christmas year before last. I asked Tim if he wanted it, and he declined, so off it went to a consignment shop, where it sold immediately.
Now there’s nothing that we could use more than a freaking sewing machine.
Mother: 2
Becky: 0
Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air–moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh–felt as if it were being exhaled into one’s face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze. It was aphrodisiac and repressive, soft and violent at the same time. In New Orleans, in the French Quarter, miles from the barking lungs of alligators, the air maintained this quality of breath, although here it acquired a tinge of metallic halitosis, due to fumes expelled by tourist buses, trucks delivering Dixie beer, and, on Decatur Street, a mass-transit motor coach named Desire.
It’s a party!
While in New Orleans for a Vanity Fair shoot, Summer was invited to a party taking place next month at the Queen Anne Ballroom in the city’s Hotel Monteleone, famous for its literary associations. Rumor has it that an editor from a New York publishing house will also be there. Summer’s been working on a behind-the-scenes tell-all about the models of LJ Runway Monday, but she knows everybody corners editors at parties with their book ideas.
“I need to lure him to me,” she explained when she called her favorite designer, Becks. “Then ensnare him!”
“You sound like a spider,” Becks said, but agreed to meet Summer near Jackson Square to discuss design ideas. While walking to the Café Du Monde for a beignet and café au lait (Becks) and bottled water (Summer), Becks saw this sign.
Photo copyright JennAn idea was born. And as an editor might say, “Then what happened?”
My fingers are mutilated by needles and EZ hates me because I keep shrieking with the pain of it all. Meanwhile, upstairs I’ve heard that Jack is dead, Rose is old, Julia Roberts just rescued Richard Gere right back, and Tom Hanks is about to make friends with a volleyball named Wilson.
I could have been draped across the couch watching movies all day!
