Getting personal....and liking it

Personal essays.
I battled my mixed feelings about them the entire time I worked as an editor for skirt! magazine. Nikki Hardin, the magazine's founder, is superb at writing them. It was one of the reasons she created a magazine that featured personal essays. But I worried that some essays we published from other writers might sound like whining by people with more good fortune than they deserved.

That began to be all I could think about when I'd write my monthly editor's letter. Don't let me be guilty. Please don't let me sound like a spoiled brat.

Fast forward. It's Valentine's Day 2017.
I'm huddled around the table with my classmates in The Nickelodeon's podcasting class. Friends wondered why I was taking it. I'd been writing, producing and editing projects since before I was in college.

Those projects, though, didn't have the feel of This American Life. I wanted to see if I could write a personal story and bring it to life with sound.

That's not a heartbeat on Valentine's Day but a soundwave: Our teacher, Cooper McKim, giving us some tips for putting our stories together.

On that night, we were reading our scripts. And when it was my turn, I was incredibly nervous. Alone in front of my laptop, I thought I'd written something funny.  

But you never know.

My topic was my basketball fandom.
I follow the University of South Carolina's women's basketball team. I'm more than a fan, even. At the time, I was mentoring one of the players.

So when I watched my team play the invincible women of the University of Connecticut, it was nerve wracking.

That was the personal story I had decided to tell.

My voice cracked as I read the first lines. My hands shook. I was breathless, going too fast. 

I teach public speaking and present in front of huge groups of people, but all that experience--apparently--was worthless at the moment.

Then my classmates laughed. I started to relax.

They laughed some more. 

They liked my personal angle.

So, with a few minor copy changes, I went for it.
Being able to use my voice--my actual voice as well as my writing voice--to create a finished product was new for me. I liked it.

Taking the class helped me think about new ways for telling my stories. It reminded me of what I've always liked about personal essays, the vulnerability that the writer risks and the way it makes me feel connected to the writer.

Here's the end result on SoundCloud.
If it sounds a little "rustic," I hope you'll forgive that: All the audio was recorded on my cell phone, edited with free software downloaded from Hindenburg:

Remembering Bill Cunningham...and Lord Maxwell

Reading the many sweet tributes to New York Times On The Street columnist Bill Cunningham these last few days has made me think about Lord Maxwell and yes, made me miss him.

It’s easy to remember how we came up with the name of our alter ego. Caroline Lord and I put our last names together, her idea: Lord Maxwell. The way he evolved took a little more time

We started writing our blog, Lord Maxwell, not totally sure what we would do with it. We thought of it as a love letter to the place we live and a gentle, affectionate spoof of street style blogs of the time, most especially The Sartorialist and all those impossibly cool people he managed to photograph so beautifully. Our town, Columbia, S.C., is not exactly famed as a fashion hub. We wanted to have some fun with that, but we most definitely didn’t want to be mean-spirited or make anyone feel bad. The internet has plenty of meanness without anyone else jumping on.

So we decided that Lord Maxwell would write as a newcomer to these parts, a fashion anthropologist who had inherited a house here. He would only write about people he appreciated. And he would look for—and celebrate—the many wonderful little things that people do with their style every day.

As his personae developed, I grew to love him—and think of him as real. Though he knew a tremendous amount, he sometimes mixed things up. His hearing couldn’t be trusted, so he was terribly sorry if he got your name wrong. The smallest flourish could make his heart beat faster. He didn’t care about fancy and famous (though he did capture this young woman before she became a superstar). He cared about inspired and real. He loved the people he encountered in Columbia—and anywhere else he ventured.

Before we started writing as Lord Maxwell, I really didn’t know much about Mr. Cunningham. But as I continued to learn more from writing our blog, I started paying attention to his work. In many ways, Mr. Cunningham was like our Lord Maxwell—or I should say, Lord Maxwell was just a little like the great Bill Cunningham. When I read this remembrance of Mr. Cunningham, in particular, I longed to begin writing as Lord Maxwell again.

Why did we ever stop? Because blogging is time-consuming. Because our following, unlike Mr. Cunningham's, was small. Because both Caroline and I have other writing that takes priority. Because sometimes it was nice to go to the local farmers’ market or museum opening and not approach people to ask if you could photograph them and explain why.

So, true, I don’t miss that especially. But I do miss the way I paid attention to other people’s style. Regular people around you really are very stylish. Even more, I miss the fellow we invented, his warmth and his quirks. And I miss hearing the occasional person say, “Lord Maxwell was here yesterday. I think I might even know who he is.” Of course, they didn’t. And of course, that was also part of the fun.

Now, blogs feel old-fashioned, even for a 70-year-old British fashion anthropologist living in the American South. Perhaps it’s time for LM to join Instagram.

When you're looking for a sign....

I've always had a strange fondness for the silly State Farm sign a few blocks from my house. Maybe, I thought, it's because the awful jokes remind me of a Bennet Cerf  book I checked out of the library when I was in elementary school.

I loved to read aloud from bad joke books when I was in elementary school, which surely made me like most kids.

Then I read this story about Gamecock women's basketball star A'ja Wilson, written by Willie Smith for The Greenville News. He reports about how Wilson made her decision to go to the University of South Carolina when every college in the country seemed to want her:

Her most vivid memory was the day she stopped for gas near Dreher High School. Leaving the station, she noticed a sign in front of a local State Farm Insurance agency office.

The sign read, she said, " 'There is no place like home, A'ja Wilson.'

"That was crazy," she said. "That was a real eye-opener. ... Just to see that, I was like 'OK, this state really wants me to stay here.' It was a great feeling, and I'm here."

Wait a minute...that's my neighborhood State Farm sign she's talking about. If you look at the top photo, you'll see the gas station across from Dreher in the background.  Could our silly neighborhood sign be a key to my favorite team holding the number one spot in the nation? Does that nutty sign play a role in Dawn Staley's quest to win a national championship?

If so, then it's like the sign says....or like the sign says the pickle says...."you mean a great dill to me."

A view of the sign, looking away from Dreher HS and toward Gervais Street