Writer offers great ideas for those with more dust than Dior

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BY BARBARA RIXSTINE / For the Lincoln Journal Star

(“The Joy of Doing Things Badly: A Girl’s Guide to Love, Life and Foolish Bravery” by Veronica Chambers, Broadway Books, 237 pages, $17.95). Does anyone else ever wonder what it is with some people, the ones who have their photo in the dictionary under “overachievers”?

“Nice table,” I say to my hostess, running my hand along a beautifully polished expanse of maple in her dining room.

“Oh this?” she says. “You know, I found it out behind a friend’s barn. It was really beat up and one leg wobbled. So last weekend I took it apart and refinished it. I wasn’t sure I could do it because I was preparing a buffet for the deans Sunday afternoon and submitting that million-dollar grant request for the children’s home Monday morning. But, gosh, Tuesday was the dinner party with all the other million-dollar sales reps so I just got up at 4:30 each morning and worked on it before going to the gym at 6 for my racquetball game. You know I’m in the regional finals this year.”

Or I’m making table talk at a meeting and compliment my tablemate on her pretty sweater. “Isn’t it fun?” she says. “You know, I was at the bazaar in Belize last summer or the year before —  the second or third cruise, I forget exactly — and it just called to me. I even found a matching pair of size 2 leather pants to wear with it. It’s so hard to find them small enough, you know. I just have no fat on my thighs at all.”

And there I am, as usual: bottom-of-the-vat-vanilla in a Madagascar cinnamon world. I’m lucky to have a clean dining room table, much less a newly refinished one, and the closest I’ve gotten to Belize is dropping the “B” encyclopedia on my toe last year. Isn’t cruise something to do with car gears?

But then I picked up “The Joy of Doing Things Badly” and I think I know how Stella got her groove back. Chambers, who’s the author of “When Did You Stop Loving Me?” (aka “Miss Black America”), “Having It All” and “Mama’s Girl” hasn’t got it all together — not yet — but the Panamanian writer’s got some great ideas even those of us with more dust than Dior can use.

Part of the answer, Chambers says, lies in not abandoning projects we might enjoy, just because we don’t see the word “success” in neon letters across the front.

“We think everything we do has to be up to snuff,” she says, “and we forget that the pure, uncensored joy of living in our own skin comes when we are not attached, 24/7, to either our fans or our critics. We can paint just for ourselves. We can belt out torch songs in an empty office when everyone else has gone home, and we can tango across the living room solo. … Trust me on this one: Chocolate doesn’t have to be beautiful to taste really, really good.”

One of Chambers’ great ideas is Birthday Passions.

Each year for her birthday, Chambers gives herself the right to indulge in something she never expected to master. Her first one was simple: Jane Austen Thursdays. Every Thursday afternoon she gave herself one hour to read Jane Austen. It only lasted three months, but she didn’t condemn herself for not continuing to have the time, she rejoiced in those three months of Thursdays.

Chambers has had some wonderful opportunities not normally available to the co-vanillas among us: photography classes in Morocco and friends who extend invitations for a week in southern Spain or Shanghai, among others. (My envy meter registered in the red zone.) But she’s still like many of us, wanting to live up storybook definitions of perfect.

“My most secret prayer, of the last few years,” she says, “is for God to help me stop beating myself up. I pray that I won’t call myself names and that I won’t get angry with myself over the littlest things … Because it is my deepest belief that if I die tomorrow or 40 years from now and I am still caught up in this self-critical b***s*** then I will have missed it.”

I’m not going to miss it. Me, I’m practicing my torch songs.

Barbara Rixstine used to regret not living in Paris in the 1920s.