Beauty Dish: Underground Adventures of an (EX!) Avon Lady

Happy New Year!!

I wish everyone their BEST YEAR EVER!!!!!!!

Now, take a couple of Dramamine and read this article in today's NYT!

Love to each and every one of you, thanks to you I am rounding the corner into 2007 with so much love and excitement and hope in my heart!

Bermuda, here I come!

Two and a half years ago I paid ten bucks to peddle Avon door-to-door.

I started writing these stories the week I started selling cosmetics. I don't know why. When people ask, I tell them I wanted to remember my strange customers, the women who hid Latin lovers in their closet, the ones who paid me in pennies and pumpkin bread. But the truth was something different, something I still can't articulate. My heart pumped heavy blood, swollen red cells that carried the weight of forty years of memory. I had to unload it.

Somehow, in the telling, in the eight hundred days of pen against paper, feet against pavement, I uncovered something I never knew was hidden. I discovered my fingers were meant to type, my mind was meant to race, this body held snapshot bits of pet and lover and brochure for a reason. I'm meant to tell these stories, to let my eyes fall on the person in front of me, to draw their lifeforce, their candid breath. I'm meant to write. Nothing else makes sense.

Two weeks ago I sat in my car. My back leaned against the cheap beach towel I use as a seat cover. I wrote a book review, a memoir, something important. At the time I was writing a profile of Harper Lee for OurStory, a simple description of her life, her book. It all seemed cosmic, unlikely. I pulled To Kill a Mockingbird from my purse and wrote a story. It fell into my keyboard speed lightening. I added it to my Lee profile, then remembered something I saw online and posted it at Gather.com, a social networking site for writers, in their book review contest.

Last Thursday the Gather Gods notified me. You won, they said. You set sail for Bermuda in two weeks! A literary cruise gift, the grand prize in the contest.

Now I think of myself as a Mom first, a writer second, and an Avon Lady dead last, after friend, confidant, lover, knitter, troublemaker. I don't know where it's going, just know I'm following a trail of crumbs some invisible force left for me to find.