Those old Nashville homes are usually decorated with furniture from several different eras, as well as lots of heirlooms, such as oil paintings of ancestors and antique rugs. And there’s nearly always at least some amount of wicker. I can’t even tell you how obsessed I am with wicker furniture. I have it in the Draper James stores, and I have it in my house. I love it because it’s not only really comfortable but also light and easy to move. That makes it easy to rearrange and accommodate a lot of different configurations.
Now, another thing you’ll find in most Nashville homes is a wide array of patterned wallpaper. Let’s discuss wallpaper for a minute . . . I love wallpaper. Almost every room in my house is wallpapered. Wallpaper can make a little room, such as a powder room, into a big surprise. My powder room has wallpaper with giant fish on it . . . all these fish, just swimming around without a care in the world. And don’t get me started about a bird motif . . .
My mom, whom we now lovingly call Grandma Betty, was an art major in college. She ended up becoming a nurse because it was a more practical profession, but she’s an artist by nature, and now that she’s mostly retired, she’s a watercolor painter. She loves to play with color and appreciates beautifully designed things.
I rely on her for advice whenever I need to decorate an interior. She helps me pick out fabric for furniture and drapery, and she’s really drilled it into me that it’s important to pick out things that are built to last, with classic colors and textures. She’s brilliant at finding ways to tie things together.
My mom is different from my grandma when it comes to choosing furniture. My grandmother loved antiques; my mom likes more practical things. I think I’m a blend of the two. I like beautiful things that are durable because I have three kids and three dogs. Life is messy. Really, really, really messy. But I like the mess. I think that’s a southern thing—recognizing that kids and animals are going to come tromping through spaces and it’s important to plan for it.
Whenever I see lifestyle magazines where everything’s so clean, I wonder, “Where’s all the junk?” The first thing I figure out when furnishing a room is where to put the junk. Two words: secret storage. The key to a harmonious and clutter-free living area, especially when you have kids, is to hide everything. I’m talking about closets everywhere, drawers on everything, and ottomans that are really storage chests. Baskets for Legos. Shelves for games. Just please don’t open any cabinets in my house . . . I’m afraid there might be a waterfall of toys coming at you!
It’s important to me that my home feel welcoming. I want people to feel like they can sit on the furniture. You can have a beautiful house, very well decorated, but you have to be able to sit down or else it’s not a home. I don’t want my kids to be scared that they’re going to break a chair by looking at it. It’s not a museum, for Pete’s sake!
I also love surprising details all over the house, from a light fixture here to a pillow there. My best girlfriend is very particular about her house’s doorknobs. She says, “Doorknobs and handles are the jewelry of your house.” Can you tell she’s southern?
An Ode to Quilts
Handmade quilts are a wonderful part of traditional southern decorating. My grandmother collected old quilts, and she had some from her childhood that had been made by her great-great-grandmothers. I have stacks and stacks of them in my home. They remind me of the South and the tradition of people talking and making something together as a collective. They make me think about the women who came before me, who fought for my rights and fought for me to have a better life. I still have my grandmother’s old blue-and-white and red-and-white quilts, and sometimes I use them as tablecloths at Christmastime. I even have the quilt that was on my grandmother’s bed when she was a little girl, and I treasure it.
Flea Market Strategies
You can get a ton of stuff for the home, cheap, at a good flea market. Plus they’re a great way to have a fun-for-the-whole-family day out.
When I was growing up, my mom’s kitchen window was always full of little ceramic animal figurines. My mom particularly loved figures that were dressed up in professional outfits. One was dressed up as a fireman. Another was trick-or-treating. My mom got most of her little figurines at flea markets. She always let me pick out something when we went, and now I do the same with my kids. It’s really fun to give kids $10 and see what they buy, and whether they buy something immediately or hold their money and weigh the pros and cons of a purchase. I would always spend my allotted money on myself immediately, but my brother, John, would always save it.
Recently I came home from the flea market with a little frog soap dish. I put it on my windowsill. I stood back, admiring the little frog in the window. It was so jaunty, so charming, in the way it caught the sun. I loved its character and its little hat and its . . . Oh, dear God, I thought in a flash of horror, I’ve become my mother!
CHAPTER 3
Hot Rollers, Red Lipstick & Steel Magnolias
Like a lot of women in the South, I love dressing up. I launched my clothing company, Draper James, because no one else seemed to be making the sorts of affordable, simple, pretty dresses I like to wear day to day. Also, I didn’t really see anybody talking much about southern women or appreciating their sense of style.
That said, if you went back to my elementary school class and told them I’d become involved in the fashion world in any way, shape, or form, they’d laugh you out of the room. I discovered fashion late. When I was growing up, my mom was a nurse and had neither the time nor the temperament for fashion. And I think she liked seeing me have the freedom to run wild outside with the boys. That meant that I grew up as a tomboy, wearing my brother’s hand-me-down Izod shirts and tube socks. I was not exactly fashion-forward.
Well, my grandma Dorothea had something to say about that. Day to day, my mother’s nonchalance reigned, but twice a year, my grandmother would step in and take me shopping at the fancy, family-owned department stores down on Fourth Avenue in Nashville. We would make a day of it, and she would let me pick out three outfits, including a “Christmas dress” and a “spring dress,” often in dainty prints and pastels, with puffed sleeves and smocking. (It would always look great with the orchid or gardenia corsages my dad would get for me, my mom, and my grandmother to wear for Mother’s Day and to Easter parties.) We also bought matching saddle shoes or Mary Janes.
Shopping with Dorothea was a thrill. I came away with perfect, elegant new clothes, and the stores were such a pleasure to shop in. In the weeks leading up to Easter, one department store, called McClure’s, displayed real live bunny rabbits you could pet. During Christmas, it had a model train and served spiced tea and hot chocolate. But I loved those shopping trips most of all because they meant time learning from Dorothea.
My grandmother looked rather like the great classic film actress Barbara Stanwyck, with a strong nose and blond hair. She worked at looking good, too. She loved Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar, and she would clip out ads to study the clothes, makeup, and hairstyles. Her favorite thing to do was go out to lunch with her girlfriends and then people-watch at the mall.
There was not a single day of the week when she wasn’t beautifully put together from head to toe. She even wore a dress and pearls to garden in (though she’d pair them with cute little sneakers). Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of my grandmother when she wasn’t wearing something that was the exact right thing.
My grandmother Dorothea and three of her perfect dresses. Photographic evidence I never saw her in pants.
When she took me with her shopping, she taught me what looked good and what didn’t. There on Fourth Avenue with Dorothea is where I learned just about everything I know to this day about flattering silhouettes (you can’t go wrong with fit and flare) and colors (for example, if you’re blond like me, you should probably have some bright colors in your closet). Dorothea wore only brightly colored printed clothes; she hated solids. If you had a black dress on
, she would ask, “Why are you wearing that? Did some-body die?”
Most of all, I learned from Dorothea that fashion trends are overrated. To look good, a dress doesn’t necessarily have to be up-to-the-minute fashionable. It just has to make you feel good. And you always feel good, I’ve found, when you’re dressed appropriately for whatever activity you’re doing. If you’re riding a horse, you want to wear riding boots. If you’re at a cocktail party, it’s nice to be in a cocktail dress. Dressing for Christmas or Easter was about showing your respect.
LEFT AND RIGHT My grandmother Dorothea with my adoring grandfather Jimmy. In that middle photo, I suspect she was in mourning, because otherwise you almost never saw her in dark clothes.
Dorothea said that presenting yourself well is a way to show others you care about them. My grandmother did the work of teaching me about clothes and taking me shopping, so she expected me to be dressed appropriately when we went out to see a show. And if you’re a little girl going to The Nutcracker or the symphony with your grandmother, you’d best put on some white tights and white Mary Janes. To this day, I have the voice of my grandma in my head. If I’m going to the theater and am tempted to wear jeans, there she is, saying “But it’s the theater.” And I change.
Poor Dorothea would not be happy to see how many people travel in athletic wear these days. “You don’t wear sweatpants on an airplane,” she used to say. “It’s a privilege to fly. Make sure you wear a nice outfit.” I guess she is why I have a real mental block about wearing workout wear all day long. I just don’t do it. I think you gotta get up, you gotta work out, and then you gotta get dressed in a real, proper outfit by ten in the morning.
I would never judge anyone for doing otherwise. But if I did it myself, I just know my grandmother would haunt me with that line she always said: “Only wear sweatpants when you’re supposed to be sweating.”
Crown of Glory
Now for hair. Southern women are famous for big hair. Not for nothing do we like the saying “The higher the hair, the closer to God.” That said, I basically know only one way to do my hair: hot rollers. At the end of this chapter, I’ll show you how it works.
The hot-roller technique is for every day, but when you need a professional, you head to the hair salon. Every Tuesday my grandmother had a standing appointment to have her hair done at Mr. Ray’s in Belle Meade Plaza, and every Thursday she had another appointment to get her nails done. I often went with her to both. Once we got to Mr. Ray’s, my grandma would hand me some money and let me walk next door to buy penny candy or a bottle of soda from the deli.
Hair salons are a huge part of the life of the southern woman. They’re like a secret club. Most women spend a lot of time there; depending on what they’re getting done, sometimes an appointment can last three and a half hours. I learned a lot about women and their ideas about life just by sitting there and listening. Perhaps that’s how I learned to be a storyteller, just listening to all of those ladies spinning yarns about their lives. Were they all exactly, 100 percent true? Not necessarily. But my mom has a saying about this: “It doesn’t have to be true to be told.”
I think a lot of people suspect that all women do at salons is complain about their husbands or gossip. The truth is that they talk about everything. How do they want to change the world? What do they want to do with their lives? What are their big dreams and goals? What are their disappointments in life?
I just have to show you the impressive hairdo in this portrait that hangs in my friend’s home in Nashville. Isn’t she beautiful?
I’ll tell you what else they talk about an awful lot: politics. And not necessarily national politics, though they do that, too, but things going on in the community. For women, a lot of social activism starts in the field of beauty. Just look at Madam C. J. Walker, the first American woman to become a self-made millionaire, via her innovative hair products. Once she became rich and famous, she gave so much back, including the construction of a YMCA and donations to the NAACP, and she was able to give sales jobs to thousands of African American women.
While we’re on the subject, I’m so proud that Nashville played a significant role in the civil rights movement. Fisk University is where Congressman John Lewis, who marched on Selma, Alabama, alongside Martin Luther King Jr., studied. Another famous Fisk student, Diane Nash, organized the nonviolent sit-ins in 1960 that desegregated downtown Nashville’s lunch counters. Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, where the song “We Shall Overcome” was written, trained activists—among them, Rosa Parks—and developed a literacy program that helped people become qualified to vote.
And for southern women, so much organizing happened in hair salons. There’s a fabulous book, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry by Tiffany M. Gill, about African American hair salons and their owners during the 1960s—women who changed the entire social landscape of the South. For these women, civil rights activism and community social life went hand in hand. They helped one another plan companies and elect leaders and build empires. Thanks to their bravery and entrepreneurship, this country is a better and more just place. Beauty salons can transform more than your hair.
Put Your Face On
Southern ladies do tend to love their makeup. My mother wasn’t that into it, but my grandmother sure was. She taught me so many makeup rules that I remember to this day. For example, she always said that makeup should look natural. If you have freckles, you should still be able to see your freckles a little bit even after you put on foundation and powder.
I love that the suffragettes wore red lipstick as a symbol of their sisterhood.
And like my grandmother before me, I’m obsessed with lipstick. Putting on lipstick makes me feel ready for the day and ready for the world. You’ve got to learn how to apply it properly, though. When I first started doing it, I kind of looked like Ronald McDonald. It takes practice.
One historical note that I just love: When the suffragettes were marching, at one point they started wearing red lipstick so they would all be wearing the same bold color and stand in solidarity with one another. I love how this little thing many women had in their purses became a powerful political symbol. It’s a reminder that we don’t have to diminish ourselves as women to be seen as strong. You can push for societal change and you can love getting dressed up. You don’t have to choose.
When I was a teenager, I attended a weekend makeup class taught at a local beauty school by a former Miss USA contestant named Sharon Steakley. Makeup lessons are pretty much just a southern thing, I think. I mean, I also did all the normal after-school things—dance, theater, cheerleading, talking on the phone too much—but yes, on top of that, I took a class in lip liner and eyebrows. Some of the lessons have really stayed with me. For example, Ms. Steakley showed us how to curl our eyelashes. “Never do this in the car,” she said in a hushed, ominous tone. “If you do, and the car stops short, you might rip all your eyelashes out.” Fair warning!
Another of her key lessons was the importance of blending. You don’t want to have big streaks of foundation or blush or eyeshadow. And you have to make sure that your face and neck aren’t radically different shades.
Ms. Steakley tried to help us understand that a little goes a long way, but I have to say that particular lesson is lost on my mother—particularly where blush is concerned. My mother is a big fan of blush. She’d say, “You don’t look awake if you don’t have your blush on!”
In second grade, on the way into school for picture day, I heard my mother’s voice: “No, no, get back here!” She attacked me with the blush brush while muttering “You just don’t look awake.” As a result, I have on so much blush in my second-grade picture that I look like I have a sunburn.
These days, I can slap on a full face of makeup in about twenty minutes. That’s the short version. Like a good Ms. Steakley pupil, I much prefer the intricate, painstaking, meticulously blended version, but I don’t usually have that much time.
; How to Hot-Roller Your Hair
One thing every southern woman knows how to do: hot-roller her hair. You learn young, and it’s like being invited into a secret society of womanhood when your elders teach you this secret. And you never, ever forget it. To this day, this is the only way I know how to do my hair. I can’t blow out my own hair. I can’t even straight-iron it. But boy, do I know how to do hot rollers. And now I will pass along this wisdom to you.
You need six giant hot rollers—or seven or eight, depending on how much hair you have—mousse, hair spray, and a fair amount of time.
1
Apply mousse (mousse: it’s not just for the ’80s!) to every section of your hair.
* * *
2
Roll up your hair into the heated rollers and clip them down.
* * *
3
Get into the car to go wherever you’re going with the rollers in your hair. Pro tip: Roll down the window to let the outside air cool the rollers. The whole drive, pray you do not see any ex-boyfriends or current crushes until your hair is finished.
* * *
4
Once you have arrived at your destination, right before you’re about to get out of the car, take all the rollers out, turn your head over, brush your hair upside down, and then flip it back. Spray with hair spray. Now use more hair spray. Big hair is traditional, but in this day and age it is fully acceptable to go for shape over height.
Whiskey in a Teacup Page 2
