Fashion Week gone terribly wrong

Oh, heavens. I was so excited to travel back to NYC to cover the "Mercedes-Benz" Fashion Week 2012 and interview all the great talent presenting "Spring 2013."

Things took a turn for the worse when I discovered an abandoned HD-CAM videotape lying about outside the Lincoln Center plaza. The label read "Oglivy" and "Sui" on the cover so I knew it had to be important. Must get it to my AARP readers immediately. Some passer-by mentioned that it fell from the bag of the bicycle-messenger who was injured in a hit-run accident. Then the NYC police arrived, and in my haste to procure the video, didn't notice that the lights had changed on Ninth Avenue and I was almost crushed to death by something they call the "M11."

Wasn't really crushed but my foot did suffer an inglorious injury. Also crushed was the video. (Anna Sui, I'm sorry we couldn't deliver.) Now then to Roosevelt Hospital Center to see if my left foot was still attached. They really took notice when I made my gurney entrance wearing Lacroix.

The foot is still there but it had undergone many revisions over the two days spent. It is in a hideous fiberglass and Kevlar cast.

I faxed the Roosevelt Hospital ER discharge papers to my contact at AARP. They were the most unsympathetic little shits I've ever encountered. No advance on car fare and no increase in per-diem. Nada. Furthermore came a text-message from someone named "Debby." Debby advised my contract with AARP had been breached because of failure to fulfill obligation as a correspondent for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week.

I hobbled back to my little room at the Milford Plaza in Midtown, wondering, "What could possibly happen next, Viv?" Perhaps as a side-effect of the prescription-strength ibuprofen that Roosevelt gave me (in a plastic baggie, although with my name on it) or the intense throbbing pain --- that evening I gave into the desire to visit the hotel's "cube" refrigerator to investigate what liquor might be stored there.

I ought to have known. Nothing but "Mountain Dew" and other fizzy-drinks. As much in pain as I suffered struggled down to the lobby and asked the concierge for the location of the nearest public house.

This is all I can possibly remember. I don't know how a respectable entrepreneur, with over 50 years of bleeding-edge fashion design, might be destined to end up in an industrial trash bin. In addition, with some still-borne wrapped in a moldy rug thrown in for good measure.

This is my last trip to the US, thank you very much. I've been personally invited by the Dept. of Homeland Security to leave the territorial United States immediately and I'm now in a public car making my way to JFK airport. I'm going to miss my flight, and the little baggie of ibuprofen is just about emptied.

But please don't give up hope. Once back home in St. John's Wood I'll be posting more. I adore you all.

Sincerely,
Viv