I was invited last month by the Italian Trade Agency to attend the Immagine Italia Lingerie Market in Florence as their guest. What a gruesome fate, I thought, to be flown halfway across the world and put up at a hotel in an ancient city center, surrounded by crumbling old cathedrals and cavernous municipal art collections, with nothing to eat but noodles and chianti. But, as you know, my pursuit of fine lingerie is unceasing.

Compared to the Paris show, Florence offered less of the full ...continued

Tomorrow I will turn 63. Some days I feel wiser, some days just older. I miss my collagen. I don’t miss menstruating. Mostly I feel like the same girl, sometimes filled with fury at the world and sometimes filled with awe. As I commence my Power Crone phase, I wish for you all the love and lingerie that befits your current archetype.

Photo by Amanda Majors from the Jenette Bras Pin-Up Planner

I was the third girl in my third grade class at El Rodeo Elementary reckless enough to do a Cherry Drop. That’s when you sit balanced on a straight bar and throw yourself backwards, catching the bar in the crook of your knees, with enough force to swing through and drop off the bar and land on your feet and not your face. I got the idea from watching Diana Isaacs and Joanna Fields (later to achieve glorious infamy as Joanna Stingray). They were on the YMCA gymnastics team and ...continued

Being an old broad, I regularly pat myself on the back for my nominal computer skills–every digital signature is a victory over adversity. My husband, Aaron, is similarly hanging on by his fingertips in our significantly virtual workplace. His drawing and design skills are entirely a relic of the lost analog age, developed out of his childhood love of comic books–a great many read by flashlight under the covers. As a young man he assembled punk zine pages by pasting ...continued

“It’s not personal, Sonny, it’s strictly business.” So spoke Michael Corleone in The Godfather and, by my count, nearly every business book I’ve read over the past thirteen years. And yet I struggle with this every day.

Employees are wonderful and I want to pay them more than the company can afford. Employees depart and I feel abandoned. Our vendor starts selling to a competitor without telling me? Knife in my Back.

It’s my company. I spoke ...continued