I packed light for a two-week trip to Australia. Three dresses. Two sweaters. And thankfully, one scarf. On the seventh day, after wearing each dress twice, fashion boredom descended. So, with the dresses as backdrops, one day I wore the scarf as a skirt, then as a sarong, then as a shawl. And in between I tied a sweater at my waist and fluffed the sleeves into flower shapes for a multi-function belt. I felt like a fashion goddess remaking my world in seven days.
 
When I told my friend, Annette, about this fashion feat she said, “Yup. A scarf is the duct tape of the fashion world.”
 
Duct tape. It fixes all ills. Even fashion ills.  

After watching “Ask Dr. Ruth,” a documentary about German-American sex therapist, media personality and author Dr. Ruth Westheimer, I wondered if she had friends, the type of friends who listen and question and are slow, very slow with solutions. A childhood longing for her parents who disappeared and ultimately were murdered in the Holocaust might have made her too thick-skinned for those kind of friends.     
 
I am not thick-skinned. “Toughen up.” “Just forget about it.” “Stop thinking about it.” When people said those kinds of things to me, it felt like a slap, like they thought less of me for being sensitive, for being thin-skinned. Those people did not become my good friends.
 
Still I felt a squeak of shame as I watched Dr. Ruth navigate the harsh media world with her ever-present smile. Until I thought about thick-skinned animals and their clod hopper ways. Elephant skin is one-inch thick in certain parts. Hippo skin is two-inches thick. That’s a lot of armor to carry when compared with human skin which is no more than .16 inches thick.
 
So I’m ready to I own my permeability as well as my fluidity of movement. And when my skin stiffens from the friction of moving forward, I will just shed it. Like a snake.

“We don’t heal without hurting. For a while, the cure for the pain is the pain.”
 
Mary Pipher in Women Rowing North.

Besides cookies, cake and an occasional Culver’s Deluxe Butter Burger, writers need field trips to feed on something other than their bodies and souls.
 
I’m so grateful to Milwaukee’s great institutions (and one Appleton institution) for schooling me. Here’s what I learned in one week of field trips:
 

• Charlie Radke is a magician. He does not draw, measure or plan his exquisite wood sculptures. And by sculptures I mean mostly one-of-a-kind cabinets and some tables and chairs. A drawer pull might inspire him to create a cabinet. Or a piece of wood. Or a tiny metal leaf. GO SEE the exhibit of his work at the Milwaukee Art Museum!
• Imax isn’t always Imax. Imax theater is not an Imax theater. When I visited Milwaukee Public Museum’s behind-the-scenes “Inside Out” program I learned that their theater features five projectors which are computer-controlled to blend images into an Imax-like experience.
• A classical guitarist probably doesn’t sleep. How could he when it sounds like he is playing seven different instruments? A recital by Zoran Dukic, a renowned classical guitarist from Zagreb, completely blew me away at UWM’s Peck School of the Arts.
• Cash is good theater. Johnny Cash is not one of my favorite singers but “Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnny Cash” staged by Milwaukee Repertory Theater had me on my feet clapping at the end. Tender, heartbreaking and healing.  
• Time-travel is possible. I went to a MacDowell Male Chorus at Lawrence University and, though he’s been dead for 10 years, I swear I heard my dad singing.