Monthly Archives: March 2013

Saying goodbye to Lino

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They say that breaking up is hard to do.
Now I know, I know that it’s true.
– Neil Sedaka, American composer, pianist, and singer

We didn’t really break up. He just never called back. Well, in December, the last time I saw him, he told me – when we parted – to “just text” him and he’d get back to me with his decision. But he never did. I know how to get a hold of him. I know where he lives. But as the days stretched into weeks, and I still did not hear from him, I realized the inevitability of our relationship and that this was probably the best time to move on.

Giving this man my hair
I was introduced to Lino in 1991, upon recommendation by a couple of my coworkers who raved about him. I furtively checked out my publisher’s hairstyle – a swingy pageboy style precisely cut. My marketing manager’s hair was layered and softly feathered. It showed me how versatile Lino was. His salon was in the heart of Union Square. His partner in business, who was also his partner in life, enthusiastically greeted me upon my first visit. Lino’s head was shaved. His business card was adorned with a picture of the top of his shiny head, with his eyes just peeking out, and the tagline: “Give this man your hair.”

My wedding haircut, October 1991.

My wedding haircut, October 1991.

I had bangs and a bob. Lino wanted to give me a completely new look. I don’t know what possessed me to give him my hair, especially since my appointment was two weeks before my (first) wedding. But I did. Maybe it was because he was charming and so full of bubbly energy. Here’s the unbelievable catch: I had no idea what he was going to do. This was the most spontaneous thing I ever did up to that point in my life. He cut my hair very short – swathes of hair fell silently to the hardwood floor. Thankfully, I wasn’t going to wear a veil that was dependent upon my previous hairstyle. And I loved it. It was the biggest change in hairstyle that I had ever had (save for the bad perm that my hairstylist cousin gave me that ruined my senior year in high school). Everyone loved the new style.

I kept my hair short for a few years until I gravitated back to the bob. Within four years, Lino and Len, his partner, opened up a consignment shop in the Mission District, and picked up a few pieces of our furniture for their shop. Lino moved to another salon now that they had this main business. I followed him, but by then I was no longer married. I moved a few times more and changed jobs along the way. Lino moved yet again to another salon. After I remarried and had kids, I continued to follow Lino to different salons. After my daughter was born and it was difficult to cart her into the City to get my haircut (though I had accomplished this with my son), Lino insisted that I come to his home in Alameda so I could have a stress-free haircutting experience.

In search of a new hair stylist, appropriately in the springtime, in a spring outfit.

In search of a new hair stylist, appropriately in the springtime, in a spring outfit.

All in the family: sons, daughters, and mothers
My daughter loved coming with me to the City to get my haircut these last few years. We had this tradition of getting her a triple hot chocolate drink and a toasted bagel with cream cheese at Borders, on the way to Lino’s salon. (Borders, of course, no longer exists in Union Square.) I would sit across the table from my daughter and smile as she savored her chocolate and bagel, thinking that when she is an adult she will remember this special time that we spent together. I hated having to rush her so we could be on time for my appointments. Lino gave her a big hug every time she walked through the door. He gave her jewelry that he either made or had given to his daughter when she was a young. Whenever my daughter wears one of his necklaces, she proudly reminds me that Lino gave it to her. One time he had one of the manicurists paint her nails bubble-gum pink, and he made sure that the two mannequin heads were available so she could brush and style their hair.

Go bold with ethnic-inspired jewelry, floral blouse, hot pink skirt, and laser-cut sandals.

Go bold with ethnic-inspired jewelry, floral blouse, hot pink skirt, and laser-cut sandals.

When Lino lost his son, who took his own life one Christmas Eve, it was the first time I had ever seen him subdued. Up until then, he was always in good spirits and was a breath away from laughter, even when he complained about a salon owner or one of his relatives. I sat, shocked in his chair, not knowing what to say, other than how very sorry I was. I hugged him a moment or two longer than I usually did when we said goodbye. He never spoke of that time again, except once in reflection months later when he relayed a conversation he’d had with his daughter – how time seemed to keep going, how people seemed to carry on with their lives, while the two of them struggled to understand what had happened. When I lost my mother at age 85 to complications of pneumonia – Lino’s own mother, the matriarch, was in her 90s at the time – he was quietly supportive. He knows what a Filipino mother is like, how strong she is, how she wears the pants in the family. And with that knowledge, he knew what a gaping hole that loss had created.

Growing old, not growing old together
Time and age started creeping up on the both of us. Lino complained of arthritis, removing the scissors to massage his hands. He kept threatening to retire. He was already in semi-retirement the last few years, into his 60s, though he looks like he’s still in his 40s – in large part, he would say, to having cleansed his diet. (He amazingly had never seen a doctor in decades.) Exhausted by work and late motherhood, I found myself falling asleep in his chair. It was one of the few times and places where I could relax. But it was getting harder to make an appointment, as I had to work around the one week a month that was his schedule. Nevertheless, I refused to look around, even though I knew there would come a time when I would have to face the inevitable. When I couldn’t get an appointment, I would resort to cutting my own bangs until I could get in. A few times I went to some local salons, only to know with the first snip that I wouldn’t be going back to this or that place.

Playing up a blooming spring blouse with earrings from a New York City street fair, Sundance flower ring, Anthropologie statement necklace, and a water buffalo horn cuff from my sister's trip to Kenya.

Playing up a blooming spring blouse with earrings from a New York City street fair, Sundance flower ring, Anthropologie statement necklace, and a water buffalo horn cuff from my sister’s trip to Kenya.

Sometimes Lino was late or completely forgot about me being his first appointment. I’d have to wait a long time, and though I seethed in the waiting area, I didn’t leave. I couldn’t leave. Nobody could do a blunt cut as precisely and reliably as he could. And we had a history together. Then late last fall, the salon owner died of leukemia, and he informed me that the other stylists couldn’t afford to buy the salon and so it would be shut down. He had an offer to rent a chair at another place, but the catch was he’d have to put in more hours, which he didn’t want to do, and then he was going to need to raise his price. (He had never raised his fee for me in the past 21 years, which friends tell me is unheard of.) Because of the increase, he felt it necessary to take a poll to see if he’d lose a chunk of his clients. I don’t know how the survey went, though I told him I’d follow him yet again at whatever price. His other option was just to hang up his scissors and retire – he was already on that path.

He told me to text him after the holidays, and he’d let me know his decision. We hugged and wished each other a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. When I couldn’t reach him, I began a search for his replacement – with sadness. I checked out yelp reviews and found Jenn Archbold of Florescence Designs (1700 Solano Avenue, Suite C, Berkeley, CA 94707, 510.526.1073). I admit that I was somewhat nervous, not having gone to a hairstylist with the idea that he or she would be the one after Lino. She listened to what I wanted and executed it perfectly. We had a nice conversation, and she was able to talk and cut at the same time – something Lino was incapable of doing, which made haircut appointments longer with him. For a moment, I was hoping that it would be just okay, which would give me permission to reach out to Lino again.

But I made the next appointment before I left. Happy to have found an artisan who can do a blunt cut and work with my cowlick. Sad that an era has come to a close. Such is life.

My new haircut by my new hair stylist.

My new haircut by my new hair stylist.

My life in healthcare information technology

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The most pleasurable thing in the world for me is to see something and then to translate how I see it.
– Ellsworth Kelly, American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

John, me, and Jack practicing our "author poses" for our book jackets, The Orange Grove, Syracuse University, May 1990.

John, me, and Jack practicing our “author poses” for our book jackets, The Orange Grove, Syracuse University, May 1990.

When I’m not blogging on weekends and weeknights, trying to work on my novel on vacation time, and being a mom, wife, chauffeur, cook, housekeeper, and errand runner, I write about healthcare information technology (IT). It is, as they say, my day job. I’ve been writing about this industry since 2003, when my good friend Jack from grad school co-founded his business-to-business publishing company and asked me to leverage my experience working for a major health insurance carrier to write about the IT that insurers deploy. I free-lanced for his company, interviewing and writing articles about an industry that was initially new to me, for the next seven years.In 2010, I joined the company, now a media company, full-time. The previous year I had worked on a big project for a major client of ours, writing numerous case studies and a lengthy executive summary. It was a baptism by fire, as I’d never done a project of this magnitude before and it was crossing from the familiar territory of editorial to the uncharted waters of marketing. We took on more projects of this nature, and I became the sole custom content writer for these special projects. I had moved over, as purists scornfully or jokingly say, to the “dark side.”

My company mugshot.

My company mugshot.

As journalists, your interviewees, PR people, marketers, and the like do not see what you’ve written until it’s published. The separation of church and state is protected and preserved. What I write, however, is edited, reviewed, and approved by as many as several departments. They are our customer, after all. On a high note, a well-known industry visionary from a major global company merely added one sentence to my white paper and told his marketing director that I was his new favorite writer. On a low note, I’ve had a client redline what I’ve written to the point of non-recognition – in other words, if I had a byline, it would have to be deleted because it was no longer mine. Sometimes, you just never know, which makes each project somewhat of a blank slate. It’s my way of living on the edge, professionally speaking.

Why healthcare IT is important to you and me
Pressure and uncertainty aside, I enjoy what I do. Healthcare IT is an important industry that touches everyone because we are all patients – most if not all of us have been in a hospital and gone to the doctor’s office. Two major pieces of legislation to come out of the Obama administration that impacts all of us is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act (ACA), of 2010. Within ARRA is the HITECH Act, which essentially contains a number of incentive programs for the adoption of healthcare IT, especially electronic health records (EHRs) and health information exchange. ACA includes provisions that are more easily achieved through the adoption of healthcare IT, which is by design.

My company's back East, and I'm out West. I work at home, which enables me to wear such things as vegan leather pants at my office.

My company’s back East, and I’m out West. I work at home, which enables me to wear such things as vegan leather pants at my office.

I have seen the shift in both my primary care physician’s office and my kids’ pediatrician’s office from paper records to electronic records. Our pediatricians carry around their tablets and enjoy pulling up apps with their stylus pens. Gone are the shelves upon shelves of paper records in file folders. It is disruptive technology, for sure. EHRs were originally developed as a documentation tool so physicians could properly bill for the services they rendered in the traditional fee-for-service, or fee for volume, reimbursement world. Today, we are asking EHRs to document care, aggregate relevant patient information, and deliver the right information to the right clinician at the right time in order to improve the quality of care, clinical outcomes, and patient safety in a more streamlined, cost-effective manner. (We are also trying to shift to a pay-for-quality reimbursement model.) There are naysayers who want to eliminate EHRs and all healthcare IT because they are expensive, disrupt clinician workflow, create more work, and don’t do what they claim they will do. Privacy watchdogs warn of greater risk of data breaches. The technology has to continue to be re-engineered and vendors have to develop robust, reliable, and user-friendly technology (not just sell a bunch of software licenses that lock healthcare providers into long contracts with bad technology that clinicians don’t want to adopt). And policy has to continue to be refined so as to protect patient information.

A plum-colored sweater gets a boost with a Missoni scarf and bold Pam Hiran necklace (Anthropologie).

A plum-colored sweater gets a boost with a Missoni scarf and bold Pam Hiran necklace (Anthropologie).

We are getting there. It’s a painful growing process. Legislation was put into place to speed the inevitable. The healthcare industry is woefully behind, if you look at how the banking and financial services and retail industries have embraced technology. Consumers will demand it in healthcare. They are already demanding to communicate with their healthcare providers across various channels of their choice and wanting to interact in a way that is more convenient for them. According to the Pew Internet Project, 45 percent of American adults have smartphones. According to an industry survey, 53 percent of clinicians use smartphones and 47 percent use tablets in their healthcare work environment. Medical schools are incorporating healthcare IT into their curriculum. So, really, it’s only a matter of time before we achieve the same state of IT adoption that we enjoy in other industries. And it’s only a matter of time before you can be in another part of the country far from home, end up unconscious in the emergency room, and the physician who is treating you can pull up your EHR, see what medications you’re taking, what allergies you have, and what other health conditions you have, and therefore know what medications he or she can or cannot give you based on that critical information. That’s why I take pride in what I write. This is important stuff. Admittedly, some topics are more engaging than others. Vendor neutral archive, anyone? But my job is to make the topic engaging. My job is to entice healthcare executives, managers, and clinicians to read what I write. Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, a short story or chapter in a novel, or a blog or case study or white paper, I have one goal: To find the narrative and tell the story in a clear, concise, and engaging way.

I work at my home office, but I still dress up as a way to be disciplined and to take myself seriously while working.

I work at my home office, but I still dress up as a way to be disciplined and to take myself seriously while working.

Cocktail party topics
In my research, I learn so many things. For example, RAND Health reported that approximately 133 million Americans had a least one chronic illness in 2005, which is astounding to me. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, every year, chronic disease, which includes cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke, causes 70 percent of deaths in the U.S. and comprises approximately 75 percent of medical care spend. Our healthcare costs comprised 17.9 percent of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2012, and it’s expected to climb to 18.4 percent of GDP in 2017. And yet, up to 80 percent of chronic diseases can be prevented – mostly with lifestyle changes. The solution is both simple yet exceedingly difficult.Here are more interesting data. Did you know that persons aged 65 years or older numbered 39.6 million in 2009, which is 12.9 percent of the U.S. population or one in every eight Americans? By 2030, the number will grow to approximately 72.1 million older persons, or 19 percent of the population. The proportion of the global population over the age of 60 is projected to double from approximately 11 percent to 22 percent – from 605 million to 2 billion – between 2000 and 2050, according to the World Health Organization. Imagine the implications on our societies and economies to have countries with inverted pyramid populations?

Fun accessories complement the sequined birds.

Fun accessories complement the sequined birds.

In the U.S. we haven’t yet figured out how we are going to build a sustainable healthcare delivery system that will allow us to “age in place,” or grow old at home and not in an institutional setting. We have to look to other models in other countries. In Hong Kong, for example, instead of dispersing more funds to care for dependent citizens, the government is adding incentives to the same allocation of money if the patients’ functionality – which is the operative word – improves. We need to identify and support necessary enabling technologies to ensure a person’s maximum functionality so he or she can live productively within the community. Evidence exists that enabling an older person to stay at home saves money. Global aging, therefore, should be approached as both an opportunity for business and for improving the quality of life, rather than just a challenge or a burden, advocates argue. Now that’s exciting stuff to me, especially as I grow older.Writing about these challenges and paradigm shifts and potential technological solutions and visionary policies is an intellectual exercise for my brain. I’m learning so much; you could even call me a SME (subject matter expert), which is what I call my interviewees, in a number of topics. I have also had the opportunity to hone my presentation skills in webinars and before groups of healthcare professionals. Would I rather be writing novels and blogging? No doubt. But I’ve become a more thoughtful and careful writer and I have a better eye as an editor of my own writing through my industry writing through the years. I just need to clone me thrice to get everything done – something healthcare IT unfortunately can’t do. For that, we would have to turn to science fiction….

Have fun mixing black and white graphics. Throw in Carmela Rose vintage Lucite earrings, clear chunky bracelet etched with fun words from Anthropologie, MoMA 3D ring made of plastic (NYC), ruffled booties, skinny patent belt, and glossy red book bag from the Fickle Bag (Berkeley, CA).

Have fun mixing black and white graphics. Throw in Carmela Rose vintage Lucite earrings, clear chunky bracelet etched with fun words from Anthropologie, MoMA 3D ring made of plastic (NYC), ruffled booties, skinny patent belt, and glossy red book bag from the Fickle Bag (Berkeley, CA).

Celebrating the Monday Moms

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If you aren’t nurturing your self, what kind of mother can you be, anyway?
– Sandra Scofield, American novelist and essayist

When I was pregnant with my son in the spring of 2000, David and I signed up for a birthing class. We thought we were all set until a good friend of mine asked me if we were going to have a doula present for the birth. At the time, I had no idea what a doula was, let alone how to spell it, but instead of admitting ignorance I told my friend that we had decided against having a doula. And then when I went home after our lunch date, I quickly looked up the definition for doula, which is a labor coach. As all pregnant women discover, you are quickly inundated with both solicited and unsolicited advice. Natural birth/no drugs versus epidural, home versus hospital birth, vaginal versus Caesarean section delivery, disposable versus cloth diapers, bottle versus no bottle, mom’s milk versus formula, and the list goes on.

Six of us get together in the summer of 2003.

Six of us get together in the summer of 2003.

One piece of advice I took that I am still benefiting from is joining a mom’s group. In response to her experience as a first-time mother, Sherry Reinhardt founded Support Groups for Mothers in Berkeley in the late 1970s. As you prepare to welcome your new baby into the world, nobody tells you about the enormous life changes that leave you overwhelmed and isolated. You’re supposed to be overwhelmed with joy, not with exhaustion, uncertainty and ambivalence, and even sadness. I recalled a conversation I had with one of the moms, Stephanie, in my birthing class who was the first one in the group to deliver. We had been parked in our gliders, nursing our sons for what seemed like an eternity. My uniform of t-shirts and sweatpants never changed. We needed to get out of the house, and so we signed up for one of Sherry’s support groups.

Celebrating 10 years of the Monday Moms in 2010.

Celebrating 10 years of the Monday Moms in 2010.

We met at Sherry’s house for an hour, once a week on Monday afternoons for eight weeks. There were 10 of us. I remembered feeling intimidated – both by Sherry and some of the other moms, who had strong personalities and opinions to match. We talked through nursing issues, differed on vaccinations, and anguished over trying to get our babies to sleep through the night. One of the most ferocious fights David and I ever had was when I had to miserably listen to my son wail for what seemed like hours while David kept me from dashing out of bed and down the hallway to the nursery to rescue him. After three nights, my son began sleeping through the night. When our eight weeks were up, Sherry encouraged us to continue to get together regularly.

After a Sunday breakfast at Fat Apple's in Berkeley, December 2012.

After a Sunday breakfast at Fat Apple’s in Berkeley, December 2012.

And we did. We called ourselves the Monday Moms, though we met on a different day and took turns hosting the meetings each week. We created an eGroups account for group messages. We had potlucks for the entire families. The more adventurous and proactive in the group set up various activities such as trips to the Lawrence Hall of Science, the El Cerrito community pool, and Lake Anza. We swapped babysitting, so couples could go out to dinner without having to pay for a babysitter. We shared advice on daycare and preschools as some of us returned to full-time jobs outside of the house. We welcomed siblings into the mix.

Ready for Sunday breakfast with the Monday Moms, March 2013.

Ready for Sunday breakfast with the Monday Moms, March 2013.

When our kids entered kindergarten, we took a parenting support class with a licensed professional on Thursday evenings for six weeks. It was a huge change for the kids and us, and we had plenty to talk about in that class. I remember being very frustrated that my very well-behaved son was getting accolades in his kindergarten class but at home was throwing tantrums at will. Our facilitator explained that kids want to do well in their new, very structured surroundings because it’s expected of them. When they come home, however, they fall apart because they’ve expended their energy keeping it together all day. More importantly, they feel secure enough to act out, knowing that we love them unconditionally. While it was still difficult to deal with my son’s tantrums for the next few months, understanding the situation brought greater patience.

The horse t-shirt gets a polished look with a lace skirt, heeled booties, and a textured handbag.

The horse t-shirt gets a polished look with a lace skirt, heeled booties, and a textured handbag.

Along the way, we began to lose members of our tribe. After the first year, Marsha left. Her husband was on leave from his academic position at Brown University, so we knew they would be gone by the end of the year. It wasn’t a surprise, and yet it was still jarring to be minus one mom. And then Michelle moved to Colorado after finishing her doctoral program in developmental psychology and founded her own company based on a signing program for young children. Kate and her family moved to upstate New York, where their kids would be closer to both sets of grandparents. There were leaves of absences throughout the last 13 years – Fiona to New Jersey when her husband taught at Princeton for a year, Renu to India for a year where her husband’s company had a large office, and Sandy currently in Hong Kong for a second year where she’s teaching at an international school.

In 2010, we celebrated our first children’s 10th birthdays. We are entering our 13th year together, dealing with middle school, adolescence, assertions of independence. We’ve tried to meet monthly a few times the last several years – searching for that ideal day and time. The irony is that Marsha, whose in-laws live in Berkeley, is the person who gets us together when her family visits during the winter holidays and in the summer. We are trying again.

Carmela Rose vintage Lucite honeycomb earrings, vintage bracelet, Sundance stackable rings, and In God We Trust (NYC) ring.

Carmela Rose vintage Lucite honeycomb earrings, vintage bracelet, Sundance stackable rings, and In God We Trust (NYC) ring.

The thing about a mom’s groups is that you don’t choose who is in your group. It’s based on when your child is born, as it makes more sense to deal with developmental issues when the kids are the same age. We all have vastly different lives, live in different cities and our kids go to different schools, and our personalities and temperaments are varied. We started out as strangers having one thing in common – our first babies. Thirteen years later, I marvel at the bond we have formed, given the fact that we likely would not have gravitated to one another. Through the years, we have comforted one another over the deaths of our parents and our in-laws, and supported one of our moms who triumphed over cancer. The last time we got together, two Sunday mornings ago, instead of a free-for-all discussion, Mimi asked that we go around the table for a check-in, which was nice. It helped us to focus on one another and offer solicited advice. We are rapidly approaching those milestones – graduating to high school, graduating from high school, moving away to college. As scary as they are, there is a certain comfort in knowing that we have known each other since our kids were babies. That even as our kids have become less familiar with each other in the group and are growing up and onwards, we are still the Monday Moms.

Mixing textures again: horse t-shirt and lace skirt (Anthropologie), black booties, and Kate Spade textured handbag (Urbanity).

Mixing textures again: horse t-shirt and lace skirt (Anthropologie), black booties, and Kate Spade textured handbag (Urbanity).

Transitions and Transformations: Jen Komaromi of Jenny K

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Progress always involves risk; you can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.
– F.W. Dupee, American literary critic, essayist, and English professor

Multi-tasking Jen Komaromi rings up a purchase while listening to a local customer.

Multi-tasking Jen Komaromi rings up a purchase while listening to a local customer.

Jen Komaromi was raised in a family that has been in the automobile tire business for three generations – in fact, since its invention. Her grandfather had managed a rubber factory in the Philippines post World War II. Her father was an international sales representative for Firestone, with Africa and Southeast Asia as his territories. (Komaromi was born in Liberia before her family relocated to Hong Kong.) Her father didn’t enjoy working for someone else and after starting a company with a group of former employees, he built up his own distributorship and sold tires wholesale and retail in the Sacramento area. Not surprisingly, owning a family business was not a goal of Jen’s because she had witnessed firsthand its many challenges. The entrepreneurial desire was hardwired, however, and surfaced when she worked at a café and bakery in Tahoe while also holding down a job in the forest service. Jen worked mostly by herself, standing up the restaurant’s newly opened bakery. During this time, she discovered her natural ability to sell things and help people out. “I really enjoyed it,” she said. “That was the very first taste [of wanting to run a business].”

The Beginning of Jenny K
When Jen moved to the Bay Area, she got a job with a Berkeley-based wholesale jewelry manufacturer that produced pewter charms. The gift industry intrigued her because it was full of innovation and mostly comprised small mom-and-pop-type outfits. “I loved it right away, and I’ve been in it ever since,” she said. In 2001, she decided to work on her own as a sales representative and upon the suggestion of a co-worker named her rep group Jenny K, which was an easy company name for her customers to remember. Jen sold manufacturers’ merchandise to retail stores – as small as her current store and as large as Cost Plus and Red Envelope – and landed key accounts that comprised a healthy percentage of the company’s business. While she thoroughly enjoyed the wholesale world, gas prices were rising and the industry as a whole became more challenging.

A Ryan Du Val mural above the storefronts graces Jenny K gift store and Well Grounded Tea & Coffee Bar.

A Ryan Du Val mural above the storefronts graces Jenny K gift store and Well Grounded Tea & Coffee Bar.

At the same time, Jen had developed a website and was soon filling product orders for this growing part of her business, which prompted her to convert her wholesale website to a retail site. When the paperwork and inventory of her online business began overtaking her house, her husband Kevin O’Neal suggested she find an office. The small space she found within her price range, which is two doors down from where she currently resides, had a storefront, which made it ideal to display her goods. The time she put into the store took away from being a sales representative, and she eventually threw her energy full time into Jenny K as a retail store (6921 Stockton Avenue, El Cerrito, 510.528.5350). Given her love of traveling, Jen was reluctant to give up her wholesale business and imagines going back to it one day, but she says she “finally embraced retail.”

Learning from the family business, following her instincts
Jen credits her staying power to her father’s “eternal optimism,” which she says is a necessity of owning a business. She remembers her growing-up years of living frugally and witnessing her parents struggle. “Because of that, I’m willing to make the sacrifices, whereas not everybody is willing to do that,” she said. Not that being in wholesale didn’t have its moments of difficulties – Jen recalled the early days of being a sales rep when she called her father in tears and he coached her through the rough times. “He trained me to be a salesperson,” she said.

Customers can find glassware and a large selection of greeting cards.

Customers can find glassware and a large selection of greeting cards.

The idea to operate both a gift store and a café – Kevin runs their Well Grounded Tea & Coffee Bar (6925 Stockton Avenue, 510.528.4709), which opened in 2005 after Jenny K was established – came to her early on when she was a sales rep. Jen observed that one of her best customers in Scotts Valley, whose gift shop was next door to a Starbuck’s, was always busy. “I saw how successful that concept was,” she said. The other inspiration was the Cracker Barrel chain, which operates in the south. The model incorporates a gift shop and café, with patrons having to walk through the gift shop to get to the food. The gift store chain is the most successful in the nation in terms of sales volume, Jen pointed out. While Cracker Barrel’s theme is country, she wanted to create a California version of the chain store.

Jenny K has something for everyone.

Jenny K has something for everyone.

Jen and Kevin pitched the idea of a café to group of people, but when no offers surfaced, they decided to do it themselves. “My husband is crazy enough to go along with my ideas,” she said, laughing. At the time, Kevin had a full-time job, but he soon quit to run the café side of the business. For many couples, the thought of working so closely together in a business venture is overwhelming, but Jen said, “We’ve been able to make it work.” It helps that their traits are complementary; whereas Jen comes up with ideas, Kevin follows through and gets the job done. “We balance each other out,” she said. “I couldn’t really do the business without him, and he couldn’t really do it without me.”

Jenny K is stocked with beautiful gifts such as these floral slippers.

Jenny K is stocked with beautiful gifts such as these floral slippers.

When they first started, it took a while to play off of each other’s strengths and compensate for each other’s weaknesses, but they soon found their working relationship groove. Jen is quick to point out that if the retail store and café had started somewhere else other than El Cerrito, their business likely would have failed. “The community really embraced us, and forgave us for our faults,” she explained. “We are really learning how to do it all. We’re growing into our business.”

Abloom with resin and satin and tulle roses.

Blooming with jewelry – earrings and necklace by Yotl Designs – from Jenny K.

One thing Jen hasn’t had to learn is finding and offering high-quality products at a price point that local customers will support. Having grown up with parents and grandparents who collected antiques and art, Jen had long honed her sense of timeless style and an eye for distinctive products. For quality and environmental reasons, her store is devoid of tchotchkes. “I don’t want to create more garbage in the world or sell things people don’t want that end up in landfills,” she said. Jen has applied her green philosophy to both businesses. She likes to stock consumable products – her soap line is, in fact, her biggest selling product – and chooses goods that everyone can use. Using organic ingredients in the café distinguishes Well Grounded from other cafés, but it also honors Jen’s and the community’s commitment to being green and supporting organic lifestyles. El Cerrito has a long history of recycling and supporting green practices, and its newly redesigned recycling center received the highest rating for green building.

Bath and beauty products are popular items.

Bath and beauty products are popular items.

Jenny K in 2013 and beyond
Currently in the midst of a renovation that includes the addition of a bathroom and café seating along the big picture window at the front of the store, Jenny K will be completed in time for the Stockton Avenue May Art Stroll, an event Jen and her husband established six years ago. The stroll, which has been in hiatus the last two years, will be making a comeback this year.

With all the extra space to fill, Jen is expanding her product lines and range. The store boasts an upstairs “play space” that will soon be home for classes for older kids and adults, while the main level will be available for hosting birthday parties. Jenny K “tested” a paper airplane class in the fall, and its success has prompted her to plan a series of classes based on the Klutz craft kits.  The first set of classes will debut in April.

There are all kinds of toys and books for every age group.

There are all kinds of toys and books for every age group.

Expect more fundraising and other community events to take place now that Jenny K has more room. This past November, Jenny K held a week-long fundraiser for Portola Middle School, with 20 percent of the purchases being donated to the school. The fundraiser, which raised more than $700, culminated in a Friday evening soiree with wine and hors d’oeuvres and a jewelry trunk show with two local jewelry designers. “We’ve always been supportive of the community,” Jen said. When she and Kevin first came to El Cerrito, they were involved in helping to restore the Cerrito Theater. One of the big benefits of owning a business, according to Jen, is how much they can give back to the community. “It’s definitely one of our goals,” she said, of helping to create that sense of community in El Cerrito.

Jenny K carries a wide variety of jewelry designers.

Jenny K carries a wide variety of jewelry designers.

Jenny K has been on Stockton Avenue since 2004. For now, the retail business works well for Jen, who has a son in kindergartener and a three-year-old daughter – both of whom can often be found “helping” Komaromi in her store and café. “It [the store and café] enables us to have a business where we can be here for our kids,” she explained, as she watches her kids race through the store and up the stairs to the play area. As a national sales manager in wholesale, she was on the road 30 percent of the time, traveling around the country, which is not conducive to raising a young family. Once her daughter is in elementary school, however, Jen wants to find a location that is more densely populated and would enable the gift store and café to truly be integrated and exist on a “grander scale.” For now, Jenny K and Well Grounded Tea & Coffee Bar are bustling and welcoming fixtures for the locals, especially on weekend mornings.

The Komaromi-O'Neil family greets customers at the entrance of Jenny K.

The Komaromi-O’Neil family greets customers at the entrance of Jenny K.

Making A Place at the Table for everyone

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The one who moves a mountain, begins with removing small stones.
– Chinese proverb

My father lived through the Great Depression and in many ways he never outgrew some of the habits he had developed out of necessity during those lean years. He saved everything – repurposing envelopes from solicitations that came in the mail, washing and reusing Ziploc bags until they no longer closed, turning scraps of paper into scratch paper, and straining old cooking oil to use for frying the next meal, just to name a few things. He never wasted anything, especially food. Any leftover food on our plate, if we couldn’t be forced to finish it or didn’t push it off onto our father’s plate without my mother seeing, was fed to the dogs. My father tended a huge vegetable garden behind our house, and what vegetables he couldn’t fit in the freezer he gave away to relatives and friends in the neighborhood. My mother, her family, and her community in the mountainous Baguio City endured food shortages during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, and one of my mother’s siblings died of malnutrition during World War II.

I took a lot of photos of my father in his garden while taking a photography class in 1982.

I took a lot of photos of my father in his garden while taking a photography class in 1982.

My sisters and I got it from both sides – you will not waste food. Period. Their habits were ingrained in us. Except for reusing old oil, I picked up a lot of my father’s Depression-era practices. I really hate to throw out spoilt food (I should say that I hate letting food get to that state), regardless of the fact that we can now compost all food materials, not just vegetables and fruit. Trying to teach my kids to be grateful for the food on the table is difficult when they have never had to go without food, shelter, or clothing – and as parents, that is our goal. That is what my parents strove for – having their children never wanting for the basics. It reminded me of a post-interview conversation I had with a Latino executive for a SHPE Magazine (Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers) freelance assignment. He had related his experiences of being the only Latino in his first job at a corporation, save for the janitor who was cleaning the offices at night. He and his generation paved the way, faced all these obstacles, so that their children would not have to experience discrimination. The paradox that the first-generation immigrants inadvertently create, however, is that their children are far removed from and therefore cannot fully appreciate the struggles and the barriers that their parents and/or their grandparents endured and tore down, respectively.

Celebrating finishing the AIDS Walk in San Francisco, 1992.

Celebrating finishing the AIDS Walk in San Francisco, 1992.

Being thankful every meal
One tradition that we engage in before eating our dinner as a family is to acknowledge the cook, thanking mom or dad for making the meal. Now that they are both going through growth spurts, they are hungrier leading up to dinnertime and ask me every evening when I’m preparing the meal: “What’s for dinner?” Oftentimes, they are excited, telling me how much they love that dish, although my daughter is very finicky about her food. Lately, I feel as if they truly appreciate the fact that they eat flavorful, home-cooked meals and that we eat as a family about 95 percent of the time. That said, I still feel as if I could do more to drive home the point. (My idea of having my family serve Thanksgiving dinner to families in need has to wait until my daughter turns 12 in order to participate, according to a local food bank.)

A Place at the Table
Reading the Sunday paper two weekends ago, I came across an interview with Top Chef Judge (and Chef and owner of Craft restaurant in New York) Tom Colicchio, whose wife had co-produced and co-directed A Place at the Table, a documentary on hunger in America. The film was opening in Berkeley for one week only, and its engagement across the country is limited. I immediately knew what we as a family were going to be doing that Friday evening, so right after my son’s batting practice we hightailed it to the movie theater for the premiere. I was disappointed that there were no lines to see the show (we were at the second of three showings that night) and that the theater was maybe a fifth full, though the review in the Chronicle had just come out that morning.

I already knew many of the stats that the film presented. The already wealthy agribusiness industry reaps millions of dollars of subsidies for growing corn, soy, wheat, rice, and cotton, while social programs such as Women, Infant and Children (WIC) are vilified for being “welfare handouts.” The overabundance of corn and soy, which are found in most processed foods, make those packaged foods cheaper than healthful vegetables and fruit. This has created the paradox of obesity and hunger being prevalent in lower socio-economic communities. It reminded me of a conversation I had with my son two years ago as I drove him to his weekly physical therapy session at Children’s Hospital in Oakland. At a stoplight in one of the neighborhoods where a handful of men were hanging out in front of a convenience store, he stared out his window and asked me why poor people were fat, with the subtext being if they don’t have money to buy food they should be skinny. It was, as they say, a teachable moment for the both of us. I told him that poverty and obesity are complex issues but that they are inextricably linked, thanks to the prevalence of processed, packaged foods and the unavailability of healthful foods – either because the local stores simply don’t sell them or they are too expensive to buy.

The film addresses this issue time and again. In one particularly poignant scene, a fifth-grade teacher in a rural community in Colorado delivers bags of groceries from a food bank to families. As a child, she had experienced hunger or “food insecurity” – coined in 1996 by the World Health Organization and defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as the state in which nutritious, safe food is unavailable or inaccessible. The teacher nonetheless struggles with the dilemma – and irony – of handing out food that, for the most part, is processed and therefore full of the bad kind of carbohydrates – starches and refined sugar. Her resolution: Processed food is better than no food.

My old company, Miller Freeman, participating in Christmas in April (now called Rebuilding Together SF) by fixing up a Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood home, 1993. That's me in the lighter blue baseball cap.

My old company, Miller Freeman, participating in Christmas in April (now called Rebuilding Together SF) by fixing up a Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood home, 1993. That’s me in the lighter blue baseball cap.

As I mentioned, many of the facts were well known to me. A few, however, were not, such as the behind-the-scenes negotiations for the Healthy Start Act, which was introduced to increase access to and participation in the School Breakfast Program when Congress was in the process of reauthorizing the Child Nutrition Act. The National School Lunch Program is supported by the purchase of USDA commodities, which explains the kinds of food we parents see coming out of the school cafeterias – even my kids have no desire to eat school lunches. The nickel and diming of the so-called bipartisan legislation ended up amounting to something in the range of six cents extra per child. The documentary shows the triumphant authors of the bill, supported by kids waving plastic school lunch trays, hailing the new legislation and pointing out that no new taxes were implemented to fund the program. What you don’t know, and what is ubiquitous in all pieces of legislation in terms of funding, is that the six extra cents came at the expense of cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which was formerly the food stamp program. It’s another instance of irony in the film and a typical Congressional act of “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

I also didn’t know that Actor Jeff Bridges had founded an organization called End Hunger Network back in 1986 and has been working tirelessly with this issue since then. In the documentary, he declared, “If another country was doing this to our kids, we’d be at war.” Indeed. Bridges, as were many of the people interviewed, were passionate and well spoken, including the many faces of those living with food insecurity on a daily basis, but the person who really made an impact on me was a young single mother of two from Philadelphia named Barbie Izquierdo.

She brought up the well-known research on the benefits of families eating dinner together on a regular basis – kids do well in school and are less likely to be involved in substance abuse. The irony for her was that while she could sit at the table with her kids, there was no food on the table. She said, “I feel like America has this huge stigma of how families are supposed to eat together at a table, but they don’t talk about what it takes to get you there. Or what’s there when you’re actually at the table.” When she gets a job after a year of unemployment – working for a hunger coalition group – you rejoice with her, as she describes feeling important, visible, and literally having a spring in her step as a result of finally becoming employed. And then three months later, we find that she makes too much money to qualify for SNAP, and her kids are deprived of breakfast and lunch on a daily basis.

Feeding our kids should not be a bipartisan issue. As one federal official said in his testimony to a Congressional subcommittee, only one-quarter of young adults aged 19 to 24 are physically fit to join the military, which is a national security risk in the making and an issue that should compel hawks to address hunger and obesity in this country. Children who are deprived of food even for a short period of time during their early years are at risk for cognitive impairment and face a higher risk of myriad emotional and physical ailments, which ultimately impacts the ability of nation to be a global leader. The cost of hunger and food insecurity to the U.S. economy is $167 billion per year. What is infuriating and yet what provides great hope is that hunger is curable. It happened in the 1970s through federal programs, and we have the means to eradicate it today.

Captain (wearing the red t-shirt) of our company's Christmas in April crew in 1994.

Captain (wearing the red t-shirt) of our company’s Christmas in April crew in 1994.

As the film was winding down and I wondered how it would end – hopeful or depressing – at first I thought there’s no real silver bullet save for an overhaul of federal policy and legislation and an overhaul of our national perception of poverty. Those who want less government want faith-based and other organizations in the community to take up the cross, so helping local food banks seemed to be playing into that philosophy. Disrupting and changing policy seems insurmountable. I ended up being hopeful. As a spokesperson for the Witness to Hunger program, Barbie gave a speech that fittingly ended the film. The program, which provides a platform for low-income women to tell their stories, was founded by Mariana Chilton, a professor of public health at Drexel University. I found Barbie’s speech while researching the film for my blog, and I present it here:

“‘You are where you come from.’ It is a quote that is said very often, if your mother was a single mother you will be a single mother. If no one in your family was a high school graduate you will be the next one to follow in those footsteps. Have you ever been surrounded by the people you love, like your children, but feel completely alone? Have you ever been in a home with open doors but feel trapped? Have you ever been in a neighborhood with constant yelling, screaming, gunshots and fighting, but are so accustomed to it that it puts you to sleep? I know what it’s like to have your children look at you in your eyes and tell you that they’re hungry and you have to try to force them to go to sleep as if they did something wrong.

Take time and learn a little from each of us because you never know where tomorrow can take you. Remember us. Remember people like us that are here in the United States that need help that are not receiving it adequately. If we switched lives for a week could you handle the stress? If we switched salaries for a month will you be able to live and still keep your pride? Are you aware of my hope and my determination? Are you aware of my dreams and my struggle? Are you aware of my ambition and motivation? Are you aware that I exist? My name is Barbara Izquierdo and I do exist.”

Celebrating the end of the 60-mile Tour de Cure ride along the rolling hills of Napa with friends, David, and my cousin, Janet, May 1997.

Celebrating the end of the 60-mile Tour de Cure ride along the rolling hills of Napa with friends, David, and my cousin, Janet, May 1997.

A Call to action
When the film credits rolled, I turned to my daughter, whose eyes were glassy and red. The film made her feel sad. I told her it was an opportunity to feel empowered and a call to action. When we got home and the kids went to bed, I looked up what we, as individuals, families, and communities can do, and there are a lot of things to do. A Place at the Table’s website leads people to many avenues of activism. At the grassroots level, we can look to Ample Harvest‘s core mission of leaving no food behind. Ample Harvest connects home and community gardeners with local food pantries, so extra harvests can be donated and consumed, rather than thrown away or used as compost.

Share Our Strength‘s Bake Sale for No Kid Hungry is a project to help individuals, companies, and organizations to host bake sales in their communities, with the proceeds going towards ending childhood hunger. Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry 2 Action Center is an online resource center geared for young people who want to address childhood hunger issues in their communities. The center provides tools to help young people, parents, and teachers to lead volunteer and advocacy efforts to raise awareness and find solutions.

At lunch the next day, we talked about what we could do in our schools and communities. I can’t say that my kids will run with any of my suggestions or theirs – my daughter wants to grow a garden and share the produce – once the passion runs its course and we get back on that hamster wheel that defines our daily lives. But I feel as if we have already started down that path of understanding, which is the necessary foundation for action. Part of living the creative life, and part of being a writer, is to try to understand the human condition and to uplift it with the gifts that were given to us and to do so in the best way that we can.

Get involved, however small or big, with an open heart.

Getting involved in school: Setting up and then chairing my kids' after-school enrichment program, which brought chess, flamenco, gardening, guitar, Shakespeare for Kids, and junior detective and archeologist classes to our kids.

Getting involved in school: setting up and then chairing the after-school enrichment program at my kids’ elementary school (2005-2012). The program brought chess, flamenco, gardening, guitar, Shakespeare for Kids, and junior detective, and archeologist classes, among other classes to our kids.

Lunafest: Celebrating women

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When we get up from our seats and we walk away, we’re changed a little bit and hopefully for the better.
– Kit Crawford, CEO and co-founder of CLIF Bar and Company

In the past several weeks, I have been thinking a lot about violence against women in our communities, in various societies and countries, and everywhere, really. Of course, this has been going on forever, but my despair over the recent cases in New Delhi and South Africa seemed to demand a response from me, for which I had none. What else could I do as a person, a woman, and a mother beyond raising my son to respect women and raising my daughter to be empowered and have healthy self-esteem so that no person would ever take advantage of her and no situation would be beyond overcoming?

A few weekends ago, as I was walking my dog Rex, I came across a poster on a local storefront and read about Lunafest. I recalled receiving annual e-mails from the mom of my daughter’s classmate. Being overwhelmed and stressed during my busy work seasons, I never opened the e-mails, I’m embarrassed to say. What’s done is done, but I thought to myself, I would definitely go this year. In fact, in a serendipitous moment, I declared that this was my first response to my question to myself of how to respond to violence against women: Celebrate women and their creativity and achievements.

A mid-weight Zelda coat from Personal Pizazz (Berkeley, CA), comfortable walking boots, and Monserat De Lucca crossbody bag from Sundance is a perfect outfit for a film festival in early March.

A mid-weight Zelda coat from Personal Pizazz (Berkeley, CA), comfortable walking boots, and Monserat De Lucca crossbody bag from Sundance is a perfect outfit for a film festival in early March.

Lunafest: short films by, for and about women was established in 2000 by LUNA, makers of the nutrition bar for women, to connect women, their stories, and their causes through film. The traveling film festival also serves as a fundraiser for the many communities that host it across the country. Lunafest’s main beneficiary is the Breast Cancer Fund, whose goal is to eliminate the environmental causes of cancer. The selected beneficiaries of El Cerrito’s Lunafest showing were the El Cerrito High School’s Information Technology Academy (ITA) and World Neighbors, an international development organization established to eliminate hunger, poverty, and disease in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. ITA, a small learning community within El Cerrito High School, prepares students for post-secondary education and careers in networking, database management, digital art, and web design.

Reception before the show
The East Bay Lunafast Organizing Committee held a VIP reception prior to the film screening at one of the committee members’ homes, which was just around the corner from the high school auditorium, where the films were going to be shown. I had the pleasure of meeting the evening’s emcee, Karen Grassle, whom many of my contemporaries will recognize as Caroline Ingalls, the mother on the television series Little House on the Prairie (1974-1982). I also met two of the featured film directors, who were slated to participate in a panel discussion with Grassle after the screenings. It energized me to hear them talk about their passion for their art.

Sharon Arteaga, Karen Grassle, and Jisoo Kim at Lunafest 2013.

Sharon Arteaga, Karen Grassle, and Jisoo Kim at Lunafest 2013.

Jisoo Kim, who studied animation in her native South Korea, is a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts MFA program and currently works as an artist for Disney Interactive. Her animated short, The Bathhouse, is a beautiful and lush audiovisual experience in which the bathhouse is the transformative venue for women of all shapes and sizes to achieve this uninhibited state of serenity. I appreciated her ability to move us all in our theater seats from feelings of exhaustion and stress to calmness and then vigor. I also appreciated the cultural reference for this transformation. It’s the same transformation I undergo when I lie down on my acupuncturist’s table, falling asleep while listening to soothing music in a warm room with a lavender pillow over my eyes and then waking up refreshed and ready to tackle the world again.

Sharon Arteaga hails from Austin, where she earned her bachelors in film at the University of Texas. Her short film, When I Grow Up, chronicles a morning in the life of a Latina mother and daughter who sell tacos on a route that takes them through refineries in Corpus Christie and ends at the girl’s school. In the panel discussion, Arteaga revealed that the film was an homage to her mother. As a daughter of immigrants, I very much appreciated how she depicted the conflicting views of the two generations without judgment or bias but with quiet generosity, and her understanding of how the immigrants’ dream enables their children’s dreams to be much grander and yet attainable.

Karen Grassle with my friend, Lisa, and her starstruck daughter Savanna, both of whom are fans of Little House on the Prairie.

Karen Grassle with my friend, Lisa, and her starstruck daughter Savanna, both of whom are fans of Little House on the Prairie.

Honoring nine films
The nine screened films, which were chosen from more than 900 entries around the world, were as diverse as they were impressive. You can see the trailer and more information on the films here. I enjoyed all of the films, but the one that was close to my heart was Canadian filmmaker Andrea Dorfman’s Flawed, which told in drawings the story of a woman who has a big nose and feels conflicted when she falls in love with a plastic surgeon. It reminded me of my own perceived flaws and the teasing I endured as a child for having a flat nose and full lips, which are typical Filipino traits. I recalled the times when one of the boys in elementary school taunted me by saying, “I’m going to hit you and give you a big nose. Oh wait, you already have a big nose,” or “I’m going to trip you and give you a fat lip. Oh wait, you already have a fat lip.” Never mind that he had pretty full lips, too. I contemplated, as the protagonist did, having a nose job as an adult. It also made me think of the time when I found my sister in the bathroom rubbing lemon juice and pulp into her face to lighten her skin, which she had learned from watching Jan Brady in the television show The Brady Bunch, who was trying to lighten her freckles. I was horrified because even as a child I understood that she was trying to erase who she was. In the same way the film’s protagonist learned to accept her big nose, I came to embrace my dark skin, my big nose, and my full lips as part of who I am, as part of my heritage.

I also enjoyed Amanda Zackem’s short film about Georgena Terry, who triumphed over childhood polio (I wanted to know more about this) and whose curiosity and tenacity led her to build bicycles that are custom-fit for women. Rebecca Dreyfus’s short film, Self-Portrait with Cows Going Home and Other Works, peeked into the life of Sylvia Plachy, a well-respected contemporary photographer whose Academy Award-winning son Adrien Brody wrote the original music for the film. Plachy has an amazing eye, and thus, an amazing portfolio of black-and-white photographs. New Zealander Louise Leitch’s Whakatiki – A Spirit Rising chronicled the rebirth of a silenced and disenfranchised wife after she takes a plunge into the waters of her youth. I was moved by the woman’s transformation toward emancipation. As she emerged, water dripping from the thick folds of her skin, she shed more than her clothes and regained a lightness of being in exchange.

The other films included Sarah Berkovich’s Blank Canvas, Sasha Collington’s Lunch Date (Great Britain), and Martina Amati’s Chalk (Italy). Blank Canvas celebrates a uterine cancer survivor’s decision to have her bald head beautifully decorated with henna. The humorous Lunch Date pairs an unlikely couple – a young woman who gets dumped by her boyfriend, who uses his 14-year-old brother Wilbur as the messenger – for an unexpected picnic in the park. Chalk chronicles the rites of passage of a young gymnast.

I came away feeling a rebirth of sorts myself. I was definitely invigorated. How can you not stand up and be excited to determine one’s next steps in addressing women’s issues after being empowered by the beauty conceived by nine amazing women filmmakers? All women, go forth and create beautiful things, and let us all celebrate all of our achievements. Only then can we all be uplifted.

P.S. If there is a Lunafest event in your community, get a bunch of girlfriends together and make it a fun, celebratory evening.

Dark-rinse jean leggings get a boost with a lot of texture: paisley and brocade, Carmela Rose reclaimed vintage chandelier earrings, my own vintage pin (1980s gift from my college roommate!), butter-soft chocolate leather, and gold-studded accents on a crossbody bag.

Dark-rinse jean leggings get a boost with a lot of texture: paisley and brocade, Carmela Rose reclaimed vintage chandelier earrings, my own vintage pin (1980s gift from my college roommate!), butter-soft chocolate leather, and gold-studded accents on a crossbody bag.