Farewell to the Runway

Well, Leanne won with her petal architecture in spite of Korto's beautiful use of color and beading. A lame end to a lame season, but I'm sad that it has come to an end nonetheless. I never expected to be a fan of Project Runway, but it has ended up influencing me in ways I am realizing now that it's all over (on Bravo at least. Results of the lawsuit against Lifetime are still, I believe, pending.)

I ended up a fan by accident. When I came home from that first stay in the hospital in September of 2006, I was in so much pain that I couldn't stay in my own apartment. At my mom's, I could barely make it from the downstairs bedroom into the living room. A raging bacterial infection had destroyed my left leg and settled into the bone marrow of my foot and ankle. Six days of intravenous antibiotics only succeeded in pissing the infection off even more. Just sitting in the car, coming back to my mom's house, was agony.

So when I arrived there with a purse full of the stuff they give you for anthrax (six weeks' worth!) there wasn't a lot I could do. Mom was working during the day; before she'd leave she'd set out sandwich and a glass of cranberry juice diluted with water, ice and a pitcher. I was barely managing on the crutches. She knew that I couldn't make it to the kitchen.

When she came back from work in the afternoon, she'd immediately turn the channel to Bravo. "You've got to watch this, Ann," she'd say. "I think you'll like it."

And like it I did. The insane personalities. The creative quirks. All the kooky ideas and fabrics and the trips to mood that felt like getting out early from school. Kayne and Jeffrey and Laura and Alison. The design process and Tim's comments. It reminded me of writing, my best writing and my best days of writing, amazing teachers and mentors who had guided me to be even better than I thought I could be, who didn't mind my occasional indulgences into self-reflection. It was wonderful.

But I wasn't. All that fall I just kept getting sicker and sicker. My walk and energy improved, but my bloodwork didn't. I went back to work, barely able to handle the piles that had accumulated on my desk during the three weeks that I'd been home sick. But no matter how tired I was, I always stayed awake for Runway. My mom and I watched the Couture challenge in Paris with eyes that never got tired of gazing upon the City of Light. "Just get better, Ann," she'd say, over and over. "Just get better, and we'll go."

I didn't get better. Not until that December, when I'd been let go from the job I wasn't dealing with, got an IV port installed in my arm and a dead, infected bone surgically removed from my foot. Then I started ten weeks of IV treatments, two a day, still at my mom's. It was gross. My hair fell out, my body ached, and my stomach hurt, not to mention the chronic cough thanks to an allergy to the heparin I had to use to flush the IV lines.

Together, my mom and I watched Jeffrey win, marveled at the appalling mediocrity of Top Design season one, and rooted for Betty to lose and Sam or Marcel to win on Top Chef. Bravo's reality gave us something to focus us away from the reality of sickness that had come to shape that fall and winter.

Now, two years later, still struggling to find wellness and move forward, I'm sad to see Runway roll up the white carpet and become part of the past. I think I'll miss it in the way I miss the old episodes of Law & Order. The same way that I feel when I see Lennie Briscoe and think of my dad, I think every time I see Tim Gunn I'll think of what it was like to be cared for again, and safe, even while doing battle with the most serious illness I've ever faced. As each designer fought to make each creation they were challenged with something that would ultimately adorn and beautify the bodies they were dressing, so it was with me, with pills and potions, medicines and Mom, trying to redesign reality, and make it work.