susanstinson

The Fat Girl Fleamarket is today in New York City. Open until 8.

In honor of such a mighty moment, I give you:

• Charlotte Cooper's account of the Invasion of the Chubsters event at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. That's in her rich blog, Obesity Timebomb.
  
  Bonus:
youtube video of a closing song and spontaneous dance at the event that made my eyes well up. Honor also to jasonelvis for curating and all.


• Deb Malkin of Re/DressNYC interviewed in Plus Model Magazine. As Deb talks about in the interview, she is one of the founders of the Fat Girl Flea and, although she can't be there this year, she has poured a lot of work and love into it over the years.



• The lineage of what I was wearing yesterday when I was videoed reading excerpts from my novel for the Jonathan Edwards Center website. I had been thinking that we were just doing audio, so I hadn't picked out my clothes to be on camera, but what I had on was:
  
  
  
  • the black linen jacket that I got at the Re/DressNYC opening. I would have succumbed to being overwhelmed with options at that event, if not for the intensity and focus of beccawrites, and I'm really loving that jacket. We were thinking job-hunting clothes, but I'm wanting to wear it all the time.
  
  
  • a gold and black sleeveless silk top with calla lilies, hand-me-down from my beloved friend, Lynne.
  
  
  • The black skirt I got for Christmas that my mama hemmed to the perfect length for me. She's making me a top out of some blue checked fabric out of her fabric stash right now. I never appreciated these arts as much as I should have when I was a girl. They are highly charged with complicated feelings and practical advantages. How lucky am I that my mother can and is still willing to pick up a needle and thread on my behalf?
  
  
  • black leggings
  
  
  • marled ankle socks from Sock Dreams, which I learned about via theoryofgravity.
  
  
  • my sturdy, new balance black shoes, because those are pretty much always the shoes.
  
  
  • I had on the vintage pearls that my friend gave me after she heard I had lost the other string!
  
  
  
  Can you see it? The beautiful way that varied relationships and communities are threaded into the clothes I had on? The power that the histories of those articles of clothing drape me with when I go somewhere like Yale Divinity School (where another community of people has been consistently wonderful to me)? The ways that the clothing that has been given to me or made or altered for me or made available to me has expanded the vocabulary I have with which to address the world?
  

And how events like the Fat Girl Flea and the Invasion of the Chubsters keep doing that -- in cloth, in images, in experiences, within and outside of language -- for expanding circles of people who are able to find ways to get themselves there or to make such moments on their own?