Lupita Nyong'o

Vogue October 2015

Lupita is stunning as always in this beautiful ice'd shade. This photo shoot was shot long before the recent attacks on Paris. Not her beauty necessarily, but beauty itself is the only thing that can save us. The beauty to let each live the lives that they were meant to naturally, not in some exaggerated radicalism that is fundamentally not what is intended for us.

I love this color for winter. Fifteen years ago, I bought an outfit of the same. The skirt had playful polka dots and the long sleeved t-shirt-like top coordinated. I remember it so clearly because it was the Christmas that my nephew was born, and I went to my sister's house for the holidays because Joey was coming. And come he did on Christmas day. I was happy to be there and able for the first of my nieces and nephews to attend their baptism. He wore a beautiful lace gown, and I wore blue.

The other thing that I remember from this particular trip is that I had the flu. The real flu. My brother-in-law is a physician and decided that I need an array of pharmaceuticals to temper the symptoms. The over-dose of flu medication did not work. He decided that what would really work is the salt of the sea. My sister lives in Puerto Rico, and there's plenty of that there. Naturally, what he really wanted was Titi Carol to come along with him on his trip to the beach so that he could sit in the ocean with all of the papis and drink whiskey whilst I watched the children. There was something about the salty breeze that wafted across the warm sands. Lucky for me, one of the cousins was old enough to keep an eye on the children so that my head that could not be held up any longer could go down. And down it went to a flu-induced sleep. The children were fine, papi was whiskey'd, and I got some needed sleep. The salt air was the trick.