I feel so cosmopolitan!
One day I’m wandering around London with my hair expensively curled, looking at shop windows where the price of a pair of underwear equals the bimonthly salary of some Indian whom I will see in a few days, on the streets of New Delhi.
5:26 AM
I’m leaving.
([photo of] the celebrations from last night)
Next upload from India, it’s official!
A few weeks ago, Ross posted the above picture on her fotolog, of the jewelry she’d been wearing for days, with the caption: “you are what you wear.” A very interesting statement, in light of what she was wearing.
The gemstone is alexandrite, a semi-precious stone that changes colors in different light. My father bought it for me in Delhi in 1977, as my going-to-Woodstock present, and I wore it almost constantly during my first year there. I haven’t worn it much recently (that’s how Ross was able to make off with it) – nowadays I usually wear a golden heart necklace that Enrico gave me, though for Woodstock occasions I wear the silver Woodstock lyre tree pendant that my classmate Sarah got me when I couldn’t attend our class of 81’s 20th-anniversary reunion.
Of course the other pendant is the Om. I think I bought that for Ross on one of my trips to India, or she bought it for herself when we went together in 2005. Or maybe she even bought it in Italy. When she was mad for a tattoo a couple of years ago, she designed her own tattoos based on the om (fortunately, she was still underage, so we were able to veto any tattoo whatsoever!).
Not shown in the photo is another piece of my jewelry that Ross seems intent on keeping: the silver chain bracelet that my classmates gave me at the 2004 reunion, to thank me for 20 years’ service as class secretary.
There’s something beyond mere fashion in all this.
Just me.
Two suitcases*, max 20 kilos each.
Since this will be a year in India, I was forced to discard low-necked shirts, miniskirts and short-shorts, high heels and wedge sandals: in other words, everything I usually wear!
Put aside is the useless junk, the designer stuff that I’d be ashamed to show off.
I look around, see my usual room – companion of strange moods, breakdowns in front of the mirror, wild dances, and songs at the top of my voice. My bed that creaks, the TV that keeps me company during sleepless nights, old diaries, fashion magazines, Barbies covered in dust, horse models, stuffed animals.
An archive of memories and variegated objects which, up til a little while ago, I was convinced were a big part of who I am.
Every Saturday evening after dinner, I faced my closet with an air of challenge, thinking that, no matter how full it was, it wouldn’t be enough to supply a completely satisfactory outfit that would make me feel beautiful, carefree, and happy.
From the closet I moved to the mirror, to wage battle with my image, my weapons mascara and eyeshadow.
I smile thinking of the usual “stroke of genius” that comes to me every now and then.
Today it was to photograph myself nude.
While I did it I felt beautiful,
carefree,
happy.
Tomorrow I will leave with two suitcases which I hope weight more or less 20 kilos each, filled with the bare necessities.
In any case, I’m always me.
Minus a few costumes to wear.
(However, if I return with my head shaved and converted to some strange religion – hit me!)
*Mom: Well, that turned out to be wrong!
I thought of a few more answers to the question: Why send your child to Woodstock School?
The photo above was taken from the top of the hill above school at dawn on a November morning. Need I say more? Look through the rest of the Woodstock section of this site, as well as the early part of the travel blog from my trip to India with my daughter two years ago, and you’ll see more of the extraordinary beauties of Mussoorie.
People tend to come out of Woodstock with a profound appreciation for – and desire to protect – the beauties of nature. A number have been inspired to make a career of it.
Another reason to send your child to Woodstock is that it produces some extraordinary people – and the ones on that page are just (some of) those who have an online presence that I can link to!
Though the specific demographics have shifted over the years, Woodstock has always been an international community made up of students and staff from dozens of nations, races, traditions, and religions. In such a context, you learn to get along well with everybody, to be sensitive to cultural differences, to find divergences stimulating rather than threatening.
In today’s globalized world, this is perhaps the most important kind of education any school could hope to provide.
A very strong reason to send your child to Woodstock, obviously, is that you yourself went there and loved it. I don’t have exact statistics (have asked the school), but it seems that a large proportion of alumni do send their children (and/or grandchildren, nieces, nephews, children of friends…) to share in this extraordinary experience. Some don’t quite manage to get their kids there for whatever reasons (finance, geography, lack of interest from the kids themselves), but they try, and some regret it all their lives if they don’t succeed.
The case mentioned earlier of the German boy who found Woodstock online and decided to go there is actually very unusual: people most often end up at Woodstock because of word-of-mouth recommendations from alumni and former staff. My husband accuses me, with some justice, of trying to “proselytize” Woodstock to everyone I meet. Well, that’s what I do with things I’m passionate about: I talk (and write) about them.
Now it’s your turn: if you’ve already decided to send your child to Woodstock, why did you? If your child has already gone, did the school fulfill your expectations for him/her? If you’re thinking about sending your child, what else would you like to know?
| Thanks to a tip from Ross, I have for some time been following a very funny fotolog by Francesco Rabaglia, aka Papa Fan (papa is Italian for pope, differentiated from papà – dad – by the stress). It’s hard to see the humor unless you understand Italian well: basically the writer is putting funny captions in heavily “Germanized” Italian on photos of Pope Benedict (also known in Italy as Papa Ratzi).
A few days ago he published an original poem, translated here with permission. Keep in mind that this is not quite normal Italian – there are no Ks in Italian, but they are often used in humor and comics to denote a German accent.
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