The Corn Husk Not Taken

APRIL 13, 2005 BY SUSAN J

It’s tax season again and as a result I am watching far more than my usual allotment of television. This is because I have to spend hours and hours sorting through and filing receipts. My accounting system involves throwing every piece of paper I receive into a box. Then, somewhere around mid-April, I have to organize it all. Then I have to make calculations. These I always get wrong. Really wrong. For instance, last year it appeared for a while there that I had made just under three million dollars and had expenses in the two hundred dollar range. In the next version I had made approximately (my numbers are always approximate: I hate to be pinned down) five thousand and spent six. As a result of my creative approach to addition and subtraction, James always has to recheck everything. He loves that.

All this to say, in a not very smooth way, that I recently discovered the best reality show on television. Yes, I know that’s not saying much. But I saw my first episode of Project Runway and it is brilliant. It’s the show where a group of aspiring fashion designers compete to become, well, fashion designers. I’m sure they get contracts or the opportunity to act as some fashion dictator’s lackey. Whatever. The important thing is that this is one reality show where the challenges are actually interesting and telling.

The show is hosted by Heidi Klum. She’s got a certain popsicle stick woodenness about her that makes me suspect she has been sedated with something natural but very powerful, like a combination of tea tree oil and a ultra-potent batch of St. Johns Wort. The contestants themselves are amazing. They are absolutely bizarre and terrific and non-reality-TV-ish. This week’s winner had a flip in his hair that could compete with Sandra Dee’s. They are all as sensitive as baby birds. I want to hug all of them every time they open their mouths. “Sssh,” I would say nurturingly, dropping in a worm of encouragement. “You are too strange for this world. Don’t ever leave Parson’s School of Design in New York. It is obviously the only place you will ever truly be understood. Can you understand me or is that flip of hair in your eye making hearing difficult?”

This week they were sent into a grocery store with fifty dollars and told to buy what they needed to make their outfits. This occasioned mass panic in all the young designers. They are the most fearful group of reality show contestants ever, probably because they are not aspiring actresses and models (THANK GOD): they are young artists.

It was much fun to watch them sprint around buying up lawnchairs and crawfish and hauling away at the rolls of plastic produce bags as though the end was coming and they, for one, didn’t plan to be caught without enough bags. Good fun that. Still, I admit that I didn’t for one minute think anyone would make anything decent-looking. After all, real designers never do. The runways are full of the most ridiculous stuff. So what would these poor fragile creatures, with their angular haircuts and twee little flat, pointy shoes be able to do with bags of green peppers and lifesavers?

Turns out they were able to work miracles. The candies were transformed into an ensemble that could have been worn with pride by the Little Mermaid, all that tin foil became a poufy skirt and the ironing board cover became an Edwardian collar (similar to what Hilary Swank wore to the Oscars some years ago). They all created amazing outfits out of their materials, even the young man who made a structured suit jacket out of butcher’s paper and a draped dress out of garbage bags, taking breaks only to talk about the unity of his artistic vision and to do a bit of break-dancing/karate chopping for joy.

The winner was Flip. He made a quite beautiful dress out of corn husks. He suffered several crises of confidence along the way: both his flip and his lip quivered with emotion many times. When he arrived in the morning to find that the garment he’d woven had shrunk overnight, the quivering became urgent, his limpid eyes blinked rapidly, tears welled. There were whispered conferences, possibly some off-screen breakdowns. (Still, less drama and far fewer tears than on The Contenderor The Ultimate Fighter). In the end, Flip won. And the dress was fabulous as Michael Kors, the designer from Sex and the City who was so fond of making Sara Jessica Parker look like a designer’s idea of a crack addict with a shoe fetish, and the Elle magazine editor were actually smart enough to realize. Hurrah for the first rational judges on reality TV!

Here’s where I shoe-horn myself into the story. As soon as I saw the grocery store and heard about the task, I said: Corn! Use cornhusks! And Flip did and he won. What does this say? It says that perhaps my decision to leave The International Academy of Foofaraw and Design was premature. Perhaps I ought to have stuck it out. I admit that I lacked focus. Drive. The ability to sew, drape or draft. That the school asked me to leave when they discovered I’d spent all my tuition funds on a series of unfortunate outfits and even more unfortunate parties and was unable to pay my tuition. But still! What could have been? I now know that I had the right instincts. I might not have woven the husks together quite so artfully as Flip. I probably would have used beer cap buttons to drape my model in a shapeless bag made of corn leavings in the half hour I was actually able to concentrate before I had to head off to Lee’s Palace to go dancing. But the instincts are definitely there. Sigh.

Well, now Flip is going to have to do it for me, too. For what might have been had I been a bit more sensitive, had a flip rather than a bob, worn flats rather than thigh-high black leather boots and managed to get to school before noon at least once. Go Flip Go!

Your colleague in Corn Husk Art Potential,

Susan

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