Well, hello! My hair is less auburn (hooray!) and last night I wore my Ann Mashburn dress to a party as I love it so much I would live in it if not for silk and practicality. This time with diamond earrings in the shape of butterflies and my grandmother’s seed pearl/diamond Cartier bracelet.
And platinum Bernardo sandals. Mom always had a pair, usually brown. Simple shapes to everything, but festive and relatively luxe.
I attended this event after a day marching through San Francisco with tens of thousands of other people (unofficial estimate of 100K but let’s not exaggerate) for No Kings Day. By now you will have read all about it, so I will only add, ours was prototypically San Franciscan.
Imagine many gray-haired women who lived through the 60s. Now imagine everyone else; Latino, Filipino, Black, Indian, French, Chinese diaspora, white, single, paired, families, straight, gay, gendered every which way. Many carrying American flags. And, because San Francisco, a few well-tanned and completely naked men hung out and chatted among themselves, while the few police at the intersections also chatted with each other, and waved back at us if we waved first.
I bought my flag at Safeway, Northern California’s big commercial supermarket chain. Yes we eat organic spinach.
All of which is to say, firstly, California is as American as Iowa, West Virginia, Mississippi, Texas or Maine. But I’d never force you to live here if you don’t like it. Secondly, this is exactly why we need democracy. If we’re all going to be different, which, after 68+ years of life I’m starting to suspect is the case, we’re going to have to support a system that enables our differences.
It isn’t easy. Even in San Francisco, with flowers in our various hairs, it seems someone drove a car into a person. No reports on serious injuries, but still.
I can’t help but struggle against my own good fortune when so many here, and around the world, lack for basic life needs. Nobody’s pure. All we can do is our best, as often as we can.
Anyway, I recommend Bernardo sandals. Sturdy Gals find them very comfortable and reasonably priced for the degree of style. I truly hope you’re having a wonderful weekend, and the week ahead brings you comfort and joy.
34 Responses
I love Bernardo sandals! You look absolutely lovely. I hope you enjoyed the party and am so glad the orange dress has become a favorite!
I read about the people struck by a car in San Francisco (AP was saying four people yesterday) and worried a little. I’m so glad no one was seriously injured. You’re a hero for being brave and standing up for others. Encouragement from seeing so many people show up and speak up seems to mean more to all of us than we imagine it will. It did to me. Hope is so important, and the voices of others speaking for us or echoing our own help us hold on to hope.
Wishing comfort and joy and lots of love for you in the coming week and always!
Thank you, all around! I promise you 100% I am no hero, just brought up to feel my obligation strongly. If my actions help others to feel encouraged, it’s all so worth it. Hang onto hope.
I’m a San Francisco native who has spent most of my life here. There are times when the cost of living, outrageous decisions by our local politicians (where to even begin?), and ever-increasing gentrification make me want to throw in the towel, but I know I never will. Because… San Francisco.
Because, San Francisco. Cue the music! Glad you’re sticking around.
What an inspiring, if heartbreaking, day yesterday was.
And what a lovely bracelet!
Heartbreaking in so many places, and so beautiful. And thank you.
Very pretty outfit, and thank you for showing the flag, literally, at the SF No Kings protest.
Thank you very much.
Glad your part of the event went off without any injuries! After hearing about the heinous targetted killing of Minnesota Representative Hoffman and her husband the night before, I feared for the worst. (Also, my son lives in SF).
Judging from the clips I saw, the military parade was an embarrassing dud, and Drumpf could hardly stay awake.
The killings were tragic, as was the death in Salt Lake City. I hope your son loves SF, and that it loves him. As for the military parade, even the New York Times described the energy as “desultory.” Nothing like what’s described below in Seattle, for example.
I used to always have a pair of brown Bernardo sandals! They are the best.
Thank you for going to the No Kings protest. I read somewhere that we only need about 3.5 % of our population to demonstrate against overreaches by this administration for the rest of us to prevail. I hope everyone will get involved in some way.
Glad you too have experienced the joy of Bernardos;)
Yes, that research on non-violent protests is amazing. Apparently, even if only about 5 million of us showed up yesterday (only;)) apparently that still puts our chance of success at changing course above 50%. I too hope everyone who cares can get involved, in whatever way they are able.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/asra-nomani-2-1-billion-machine-behind-spontaneous-anti-trump-protests
Nobody in the known universe has said that this protest was “spontaneous.” It would be absurd to think that magically one Sunday the country showed up to protest. No. We all registered online, or at least knew it was scheduled. What it was was grass roots.. Not funded by foreign states or billionaires in the shadows. Activist organizations came up with the idea, several of them primarily, but every single person there CHOSE to show up. None of us were paid. None of us are faceless political figures. We are human beings and we don’t want this lawless government that promotes hate and dismantled our system of democracy. Millions and millions of us.
You don’t have to agree. This is a democracy. But you cannot lie us out of existence.
BRAVO!!! Perfect response to nonsensical comment. And the orange dress is perfect in its own way. Does it come in lots of colors?
Ceci
It’s beyond outlandish to say that this was spontaneous or anything else that article has spouted. I knew and planned for at least two weeks about it, and I live in a small town where we had an amazing and peaceful protest.
Who are you?
I went to the No Kings protest in my city (Kansas City). I wasn’t paid to go there. It was the first protest I have ever been to. I went with several friends. A lot of my friends across the country also went in their respective cities. I’ve never even heard of any of the organizations mentioned in this article. The protest was a joyful, non violent gathering of patriotic people like me who are concerned about the behavior and policies of our president.
Beautiful dress on you. I went to the Seattle No Kings protest (70,000 estimated). It was a friendly, funny, sometime profane, American flag-waving, peaceful, and determined crowd. No naked men that I saw, but some hilarious costumes and plenty of creative signs. Drums, tambourines, and cowbells too.
The organizations that coordinated it did a good job in my opinion: emphasized non-violence and directed the protest away from recent points of confrontation like the federal building. They amplified the message by having so many protests on a single day.
But organizations had a light effect on the messages. There were very few slick or matching signs. In fact the breadth of programs, norms, and values that the Trump administration has trampled on in less than 6 months meant that people carried signs with a huge range of concerns from immigration to science, abridged freedoms, climate, trans rights, wildfire funding, women’s rights, tariffs, higher education, race equity, economic disaster expected, Ukraine, mis-using the military, democracy, police state tactics, and I’m forgetting some. One local church marched under a banner “Jesus was Woke”. A lot of people made fun of Trump, some cleverly. It was lively and heartfelt. (As opposed to the dark “fake spontaneity” projected in the Fox News piece linked above). Glad I went.
Yes, exactly! This was not a swarm of single-minded people directed by Fox News or government officials. This was a federation, a united assembly of very, very different groups. All were motivated by varying different causes, but all of them saw Trump as the single most dangerous force affecting them and their loved ones. That’s what brought us together. No need to lie about it.
Just love that dress on you. And I know the earrings and bracelet which are both spectacular. My grandmother had really beautiful jewelry that was stolen in a robbery in their home. It wasn’t insured and there went my heirloom pieces…..:(
Not your colors but heck, for a summer corded cotton frock, seems like a good idea [especially since you said you could “live in it”].
https://shopmashburn.com/products/ann-mashburn-trapunto-blouson-dress-green-white-corded-stripe-s76474
We had a fabulous turnout in San Diego! Perfectly peaceful and, despite what we were protesting, joyful. California has become such a punching bag lately. I’ve never really lived anywhere else and really have had little desire to look elsewhere. Yes, it’s expensive… but so, so worth it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T72FoUEUlGc&t=95s
Dr Phil
I’m sure I’ll be cancelled
Ma’am, I only delete insulting comments. To this video I will say, given that Phil is a TV personage profiting from a mass seizure of anyone who might possibly be an undocumented alien, why on earth would you trust his statements in response to what I posted? Not to mention the fact that our No Kings protests were not ICE-specific, they were anti-authoritarian.
Do you want America to be ruled by one person, someone who isn’t following our laws as established in the Constitution of the United States of America?
“Do you want America to be ruled by one person, someone who isn’t following our laws as established in the Constitution of the United States of America?”
Every hour of every day, the unthinkable happens, then happens again. And again. We know these dark hours are leading us somewhere. Where?
Thank you for your support in the No Kings Day protest. It gives me hope to see the resistance by so many. From where we live we could see the planes flying to the military parade in DC. It was a gloomy day weather-wise and otherwise here. As for the Bernardo sandals , they were our favorites in the 70´s. Such a classic! Orange is a great color on you, so happy !
Thanks for the great dress picture! Yes, the marches were organized (I met the organizer at the El Cerrito
organizer, Emily, holding a great American flag) by various national organizations , but the signs were individually made and very inventive. Example: “Agua sin ICE” held by a 5 year old! There was a young woman on stilts in a red, white, and blue costume. There were about 1000 people there. There were 6 policemen very kind and polite.
I recently joined a group that had spontaneously gotten together about 3 months ago
and it has grown by people talking to people, not “recruiting” by a national organization. We took on the umbrella name of Indivisable North Berkeley, but you don’t have to join the national organization (although we will eventually affiliate). 3% of 341 million people is about 10-11 million people. About 5 million people marched. We can bring about good change. Yes to July 4th!
oops re the above comment, should be: I met the organizer of the El Cerrito march
I spent last week organizing a big group of my friends and their families together to march in Whittier, a small city in Orange County. It was loud, crowded, and very peaceful. Business owners and other people working in the area thanked us for coming out. I was so heartened to see such a diverse group of people all coming together, supporting one another.
… yeah, our local protest had all sorts of people at it, and also they’ve been recruiting for extra volunteers to help (set up, tear down, guidance during the protest [food and water is back there, please watch out for anyone looking a little faint or dizzy], AV system [ours was in saran wrap due to the rain so I’m… pretty sure… it was not a professional crew]). They’ve been getting better each time at things like “setting the volume to the correct level” and we now have a Spiffy Banner in addition to the homemade ones, but y’all, every last bit of this is most emphatically not done by professionals. (I would bet that in really big cities and in “arts” cities at least the AV stuff probably *is* done by volunteers who are professionals in their day jobs, though!)
We had Revolutionary War re-enactors and goth teens and little kids and vets and people with disabilities and friendship bracelets and stickers and all sorts of varieties of homemade signs, and it is all pieced together from whatever people have, plus whatever some entity (a union or nonprofit or one determined individual or whatever) has had printed nicely ahead of time on 8.5*11 “signs” (a friend of ours is on a union board and was assigned to go to an event recently, and it was rainy this time so she did not want to bring the homemade protest sign she worked so hard on during the first administration, so she brought her union sign and waved it until it literally disintegrated in the rain). A local group of elderly Quakers has some contingent there every time.
The date and name for it was set at/before the May 1 protests, as the Next Time 50501 Is Protesting, which is why it was “No Kings” since the White House had, in late March, posted an AI fake Time magazine cover with a crowned image of Trump and “long live the king” on the front of it. If the protests had been done slickly and professionally by a centralized “push” force, they almost certainly would have changed the name/theme, since that incident of power grabbing has long since fallen off the news cycle and a lot of people had forgotten, but when you have a sprawling unwieldy pile of hundreds of protests (or more – there were 5 in one NJ county alone, and then there were also protests that didn’t get ‘on the map’ ahead of time but existed and had photos, so… who knows), all of them organized by different local people, with information percolating out slowly and incompletely along the chain, aiming for unity, you don’t change things you don’t need to change!
(we went out; everyone got drenched; it was still a really good time and I was very happy to be able to be an extra body out there protesting against ICE not giving immigrants due process before deporting them to places they didn’t come from, like prison in El Salvador and ‘camps’ in South Sudan, which has a “don’t go there, too dangerous” US travel advisory. They have messed up before in their categorization of people and have gone against previous and current court orders; they should absolutely not be getting unilateral control over these peoples’ lives, even the ones who have been convicted of anything.)(did part of my family tree get pruned in the holocaust? yep! are we at gas chambers yet? nope! are we sending people with no criminal history to places where they are at a drastically increased risk of death, and storing them in the US with inadequate medical care, to meet quotas, while talking about them as “the worst of the worst” and “animals” despite an increasing percentage of these people having only in-process asylum claims and nothing else on the sheet? yep! is that enough abuse of power and people dying and families being ripped apart for me to be ABSOLUTELY NOT about, before we boil the frog a bit farther? yep!)
(realizing I should specify that my friend on the union board was delegated to go to a recent *union* gathering as their representative, and that event had signs about Making Things Better and the union logo on the back for people to wave when they wanted to. Unions are not forcing people to go to these protests as far as I am aware, although a portion of a local union showed up to the May 1 event to cheer on a union leader’s speech, which was fun.)
Lisa writes [edited by this commenter]: “All of which is to say, firstly, California is as American as Iowa, West Virginia, Mississippi, Texas or Maine. Secondly, this is exactly why we need democracy. If we’re all going to be different, we’re going to have to support a system that enables our differences.”
You slay me. This is SO beautifully, thought through, written. Now if can just memorize it, and say it whenever needed.
Hello Lisa, I have been a reader since you started. I remember before you went back to work the second time and negotiating your entire new wardrobe- and so many ‘notes on a Saturday morning’. I am a mom of two girls 11 and 14 and live right smack in the middle of DC and let me tell you, from the inside, it is rough some days, it really is. But seeing your beautiful posts and words and ACTIONS remind me we aren’t alone. Raising my young daughters on the Hill during 44 and 46th’s years seemed like an impossible dream achieved. (I fought infertility for five years, had IVF for my first and BOOM at 46’s inauguration party (of course after) I got miraculously pregnant, Did I mention I was 43 at the time. It his hard to keep a happy brave face in the midst of so much uncertainty and chaos. I am glad that you are writing and I can turn here and see more gals like me. hugs xx welcome back darling.
Sorry to comment on something much more frivolous now (not living in the US helps!)
I first started following you about ten years ago (?) when you talked at length about going grey. I found that topic really interesting then, but I was not personally invested yet.
I’m about 10 yrs younger than you and now I’m going grey myself. I’m still working and so far I have let my silver strands float free. But now the strands are getting wider…. and yesterday my very best and oldest friend – not overly interested in looks at all! – suddenly said to me quite seriously that she wishes I would ”return to my roots” and go back to my brown hair. She says my hair makes me look too old.
I was taken aback by that unexpected comment and now I don’t quite know what to think. And now reading your post I suddenly realised that your hair was different as well. I would be very interested in how you view this dilemma. Is this something you think about? Are you committed to some hair ideology? Or open to any change you feel like on a day-to-day basis?
(I hope you don’t mind me asking about this)