A very strange and wonderful thing happened to me two days ago. I had to do a TV interview that morning and a photo shoot in the afternoon. I was looking at a rack of tops in my closet to select what I should wear. It had once been easy. The all purpose purple top and pants--what I wore on book tour, for photo shoots, for events. It was wrinkle-free, machine washable, and a color the cameras loved. In April, I packed that outfit in my suitcase after doing a book event on the east coast, then checked the bag and hopped on a flight back home. That was the last time I saw it. Since that day, Ive looked in every suitcase, every closet. Ive checked the back of the closet, the floor, under jackets, in crannies. I did this several times. My housekeeper did a thorough search as well. She knows every piece of clothing I own, but she did not find it. After two months, I finally had to accept that it had been stolen from my checked luggage. It was gone for good. Two days ago I went to my closet to pick out what to wear for the TV interview and photo shoot. Too many of my clothes are black. I was reminded once again that I no longer had the purple top. Yet I could picture it so clearly--as if it were still there...and it was, bunched up and hung awry, jutting out among the neatly hung clothes, so that there was no way I could miss it. It was so unlike my housekeeper to hang things askew--she spaces the hangers exactly two inches apart, folds the sleeves in, and organizes the clothes by sleeve length and color. I asked her anyway if she was the one who found it. She had not, but she said it was really weird because she had re-organized that same clothes rack the day before and the top definitely was not there. I asked my husband. He did not know what I was talking about. So what did this mean? I heard a giggle. Kathi. Kathi Kamen Goldmark, founder of the Rock Bottom Remainders, the all-author band. Producer of West Coast Life. Author of And My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You. And the queen of the pranksters. She and I were big on playing pranks. I spent the night at her house a couple of years ago and we giggled in bed half the night over the many ones we had pulled and the ones that had backfired, those being the funniest. I sent an email to Kathis husband, Sam Barry, asking if today was significant to Kathi for any reason. He said there was a big story in todays San Francisco Chronicle about the publication of Kathis novel Her Wild Oats. It also announced that Susanne Pari, Sam, and I would be reading pages from Kathis novel at Book Passage. Thats why today is significant, Sam said. The newspaper story announcing the book had been published. And of course I knew that getting that book published had been one of the big things Kathi had wanted to accomplish in her life--before her life was up. We talked about that the night we reviewed all the pranks we had played. She died two days later, on May 24, 2012. Sam worked on editing her novel, found an agent, and the enthusiastic agent found an enthusiastic publisher. And Kathis wonderfully exuberant novel is now newly published. If it does not make sense to you what the purple top has to do with the publication of Kathis book, it doesnt matter. What does is having everyone come to the event at 7 p.m. on August 1 at Book Passage in Corte Madera. Ill be among the readers of Her Wild Oats by Kathi Kamen Goldmark, and I will be wearing that purple top.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 07:45:05 +0000
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