Happy Friday!
Well another day and another challenge completed-hooray for us! This stunt was meant to be lighthearted and fun. I hope you had a good time and challenged yourself to think about how you approach your day-to-day. I think everyone could do with taking a stronger stance and having a little more color in their lives-yes? I'm really having a ball and I just love getting up everyday and writing letters to my friends and exploring topics together that I've spent years researching and mulling over in my mind.
I'd like to close with an excerpt from a crazy good book that I'm reading. "The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love" is the perfect medicine for when you are feeling The Reds (movie reference anyone???) or Blah or you just need a No Brain Cells Required sort of read....and if you have a secret love for anything southern or life lived a little over the top :) The Sweet Potato Queens are a group of women in Jackson, Mississippi who appear annually in the St. Patrick's Day Parade. They've self crowned themselves as Queens and embrace all things Queenly: big attitudes, copious amounts of self confidence, a strong sense of theater and fun and they don't take themselves TOO seriously. There's a takeaway for all of us here. Many of these gals have careers as Business Women, Lawyers, Stay at Home Moms, Educators etc. 364 days of the year. However, one day a year they get all dolled up in their green sequins, majorette boots, red wigs, bright makeup and hot-pink gloves. They hop aboard a parade float, toss their hair (there is a chapter on hair tossing), thrust their hips and have a rip roaring good time. The Queens are very popular and it can take you years to ascend your throne. What started as an idea of opposites and fun has become a full fledged group and a series of national bestseller books and merchandise.
"Just imagine the Sweet Potato Queens in our flowing red wigs-so vital for hair-tossing, which coupled with pelvic thrusting is the mainstay of our performance-wearing our official lipstick, Revlon's Love That Pink, and our majorette boots. God, how we love our majorette boots. Women of a certain age-I need not name that age-will empathize with this at once. When we were growing up, the Sears Roebuck Christmas catalog featured a wide array of costumes-the Bride's Dress, the Cowgirl Outfit, the Nurse's Uniform-the Bride's Dress, the Cowgirl Outfit, the Nurse's Uniform, the Princess Gown and the Majorette Suit. With it were some crappy little spats that were supposed to pass for boots, but you could order separately Real Live Majorette Boots. Out of all the Queens with our diverse backgrounds, not one ever got a pair of Real Live Majorette Boots, and not one had ever gotten over that bitter disappointment.
That is so much of what being a Sweet Potato Queen represents for us: correcting karma-seizing the moment, recreating ourselves from the soles of our majorette boots to the very tip-top of our towering red wigs. Don't waste your precious life moping over the vacancies of your childhood. Hell, you're full grown now. If you don't have Real Live Majorette Boots at this stage in your life, it's your own goddamn fault. Quit whining about it and go get some!"
Here's to embracing a little bit of opposite in your day!
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