publisher profile

Nikki Hardin

Founder and Publisher of Skirt!. A native of Kentucky, I left home at 17 to elope with my high-school boyfriend. Twelve years later, divorced with three children and unskilled at almost everything, I started college at the age of 29. Earned a B.A. in literature from American University in 1976 and attended graduate school at the University of Virginia on a Governor’s Fellowship. I never completed my master’s degree, however,...

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The "Winging It" Issue - online version, too hot for print

A friend had a collage I made of myself turned into stickers. I still have a sheet of them left and when I pulled them out recently, I thought about what I would do if I had a bunch of Mini Me's running around. If I got to live more than one dream or if I were more adventurous or spontaneous, less controlled and controlling. Here are some tasks I'd assign the Mini Me's.

Dear Mini Me:

• Please go live in France for a six months by yourself. Learn more French. Ask for help, directions, friendship. Eat in cafes every day. Wear a beret even if your head is unfortunately shaped like a lima bean. Go to Versailles on a cold, rainy day. Get chic.
• Learn to ski. I'm too afraid of broken bones, but you could do it, bigger-boned, milk-drinking, snow-loving Me.
• Go to Tahiti and get a tattoo. On my/your instep.
• Get over my Methodist guilt about owning a vibrator. Assign a friend to dispose of it in case I get run over by a truck so my kids won't have to think of me as a sexual being. Use it more often.
• Please eat my 5 servings of fruits and vegetables so I’ll have more room for French fries.
• Read Middlemarch for me so I can stop stressing about it.
• Learn to tango or salsa or hula or some dance that requires movement from the waist down.
• Go to London for the weekend with only a tote bag and a book.
• Learn to cook. Learn to have company. Learn to love it.
• Leave home without it: fear of the future, self-consciousness, Protestant broomstick up my ass, Spanx, Blackberry, timetables, schedules, Big Giant Ego.
  

~nikki

publisher@skirt.com

Editorial Note:  To read more of Nikki’s “herstory” click here.