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sister mary is new to town. ready to leave a grip of ghosts
in the walk-in closet of her East Village apartment, and with those, the dead on the vine ideas of the fashion system. Look at her. Downright fresh as a daffodil off that JetBlue Mint. See: Sister Mary is ready to sharpen her trowel, moisten her soil supplements, and lace up her kneepads for a whole new variety of service and worship. Yes, gone are the high fashion fetes,
the editorial sample chasing, the belligerent higher ups and their antiquated ideas of communication—gone is the bullshit! Gone is the vanity and materialism, the envy and judgement, gone is the dieting, the air kisses, the drugs. Sister Mary has Gone West. And Sister Mary shall harvest a garden—a garden of earthly delights, of early to bed nights, and most important- ly—Sister Mary will resuscitate her trampled spirit, her sense of self—and she’ll show them!!! One fucking turnip at a time.
Thing is, Sister Mary doesn’t know shit about gardening. Sure, she attended Pratt, where she learned that talons and talent are very different things. Sure, she’s personally met Celine Dion and can mix and pour an up martini with her eyes closed. Sure, she’s got bite to go with the bark (which is oddly on the increase, Sister Mary notes, as it concerns one-offs with the Bridge and Tunnel under 25s—her guilty pleasure), and she knows that powerful political forces saw “influencers” and “influenza” ceremoniously merge in 2020 and seek to wipe each other out... but she doesn’t know squat about growing real plants.
Alas, Sister Mary is no fool. Sister Mary knows that when you don’t know, you google. So Sister Mary googles up a holy moly storm of inquires, screenshots, even RSS. She dives in. And what she learns is this gardening business has been going on, like, forever. There’s scores of stuff to learn. Scores of stuff to literally dig into! But Sister Mary is also kinda lazy. Sure, she’s done the 70 hour blitzes during New York Fashion Week, shown up hoarse and shin-bruised to a seaside wedding or
two after Miami Art Basel, lost her potatoes during multiple Awards Weeks. But when it comes to learning things, she’s always just... paid someone? So instead of getting too intensive in her research, Sister Mary dials in her Netflix, her Hulus, and, likening the Streaming Wars to what she used to witness while spying on her brother and his smelly buddies as a kid, she doubles down on the Peacocks, the HBO Maxes, the Primes, the Paramount Plusses, the Plutos, and the Tubis. Then she bin- ges. She binges like a post Memorial Day bender at an All You Can Eat. She binges like her very livelihood is at stake.
And it is. Because what Sister Mary hopes to prove in her Green Thumbed ambitions, in her taking to La Cienega with purpose, is that she’s not just a dried up and vapid fashion
fly. She’s not just an angry cog in the taste-making machine. She’s in fact a caterpillar, inching along the stalks of her own creation, one day to transform into a beautiful (and maybe even California Sober) butterfly, cresting above the Pacific, not even needing likes or new followers to feel whole. No! Feeling whole from the bounty of her labors.
Here now, Sister Mary’s historic, and deeply felt, examina- tion of the linear gardening process. A How To, really, for the uninitiated. From drawing a plot to planting a seed, to nature and nurture’s horned armwrestling, to harvesting your dreams. To feeding a new reality. Along the way? The entirety of Sister Mary’s garden-friendly stream binge, and even her two trips to the West Hollywood library, where she was mistaken for Anna Kendrick by a librarian, and told she owed $4,607 for an unre- turned copy of The Glass Castle... which was AWESOME!!!!
Sister Mary’s learnings are supported visually by a handful of current contemporary art showings, presumably on a similar mission: to learn and grow through the dynamic expression of garden-friendly artworks; or rather, to champion that a garden is not a space, not a place, but a concept that necessitates ten- derness and care.
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