Finding Myself in Fashion Read Online Free Page A

this possible.
    We spent most of the rest of the day riding around the old city in a horse-drawn carriage. My mother was cooing like a kid in her native Polish. “How I dreamed of visiting Warsaw when I was a girl. This was the big city!” she said as she took in the sights. “But who could ever afford to come here in those days?”
    The next morning we visited a seventeenth-century palace that had been transformed into a kind of private club used by the business community. This is where I was to introduce FT to about twenty journalists. At the beginning of my speech, I mentioned that this was a kind of homecoming for my mother. When it was time for questions, an elderly gentleman asked if she would say a few words. To my surprise, my mother had prepared a little speech, just in case someone asked her to speak. She pulled a paper out of her purse, and then, in her perfect Polish, provided the audience with a riveting description of how she had survived the war and how emotional it was for her to return after all these years. You could have heard a pin drop. My heart swelled with pride as I realized yet again what a remarkable, fearless woman I had for a mother.
    When the press conference ended, several journalists approached her. The elderly gentleman who had asked her to speak flashed me his card. He was a former White House correspondent. “You were the sunshine of this press conference,” he told her. My mum was kvelling, especially because of her ability to speak Polish so well after so long, and she was amazed that having left this country as a second-class citizen fifty years earlier, she’d come back as the toast of the town.
    Back at the Bristol, our lavish five-star hotel, my mother took a call from a reporter with a Warsaw newspaper who had been unable to grab her at the press conference. After a twenty-minute interview, she hung up. “I wonder if I told him too much,” she mused. Later that night, a full-scale fashion show was staged in our honour at a local theatre. Thedirector of Polsat TV approached my mother to tell her that she had been featured on the national newscast earlier that evening. They had aired part of her speech from the press conference. We all teased her about her new-found fame as Poland’s media darling.
    â€œI don’t care,” she said defensively, biting into a perogy at the post-show dinner. “Make fun of me all you want.” A few beats later, evidently pretty satisfied with herself, she smugly added, “You know what? My perogies are better!” I had never seen my mother so self-assured, so fiercely proud. And this time, it wasn’t because of her children or her grandchildren. She was radiantly happy with herself. I had never loved her more.
    It was well past midnight when we crawled into our beds, complaining about our aching feet, exhausted but giddy, laughing and kvetching about how tough it was to be a celebrity. As I fell asleep, I thought about the last time we had shared a hotel room. In 1983, we had accompanied my dying father to a renowned hospital in Boston in a last-ditch effort to save his life. His heart condition was rapidly worsening, and we were desperate. That night, at this ritzy Warsaw hotel, I distinctly felt my dad’s presence, as if he were watching us share this wondrous homecoming.
    The next day, we drove to Kraków in a Polish TV minivan. As rows of farmhouses and strips of countryside darted past our windows, my mother spun some of the war stories I had heard a thousand times before. There were tales about how gallant Polish families had hidden my parents in their barns and brought them bread and milk. I wondered if the farmhouses we were passing were like the ones in which my parents sought refuge. My mother was too preoccupied reliving the past for me to ask.
    In Kraków, our guide took us to the old Jewish quarter, where Steven Spielberg shot scenes for the film Schindler’s List . My