Apache Junction

Sometimes you don’t need to go anywhere to travel

One of the most fascinating things about selling online is imagining the places where the people that have bought my clothes live and what kind of story is the one they are writing for themselves. I do not stalk my clients and actually have no idea of who they are apart from their name and address. In my mind what could or should be a simple commercial transaction, it’s like making a new friend. After all, someone is going to receive a little paragraph of my personal story.

Last week I sold my Versace Jeans “commedia dell’arte” shirt, it was part of my loud, take it all in, coming of age in the 1990s. It should, by now, have arrived in Apache Junction, Arizona. A full week of obsessing about this new wonderful name, of trying to picture what it must be like to live in this geometric promise in the shape of a city nested at the base of a Mountain called Superstition. For someone living in a small country, in a city where houses seem to support each other so they don’t collapse, the allure of the vast and harsh American West exerts all kinds of dreams of freedom by the way of shedding all constraints of a somewhat constrained life in a place that sometimes feels like a small box rather than a city.

Superstition_Mtn_Gallery_(DeGrazia's_fourth_gallery)_in_Apache_Junction,_AZ_circa_1970's

The simple act of wrapping a shirt, getting it ready to be posted has triggered all these images of free space where the sky is as close to you as the ground beneath your feet, it has made me imagine what it would be like to drive down Superstition Boulevard and end up somehow at the Barleens Arizona Opry. My commedia dell’arte shirt is having a new life on a stage that in my mid is as grand and dramatic as it deserves.

I told this story to a friend and she said that it must a be sign of where I need to go next…

Welcome_to_Silly_Mountain_Park_sign