wednesday, july 7, 2010 THE RELIABLE SOURCE


Jail for Lohan Lindsay Lohan (far left) was sent to jail for 90 days for violating probation.


No Howard U. (yet) for Blige Mary J. Blige’s (left) comment that she’s been accepted into Howard turned out to be premature. C2


Style ABCDE C S COMICS


Thanks! Helping a budding cartoonist brought big-time returns. C10


AMERICA’S NEXT


GREAT CARTOONIST The contest’s final-round cartoons are posted. Starting at 9 a.m. you can vote for your favorite at: washingtonpost.com/greatcartoonist.


3LIVE TODAY @ washingtonpost.com/discussions Gossip with The Reliable Source’s Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts Noon • The Web Hostess with Monica Hesse 2 p.m.


Big I


beautiful and


At Full Figured Fashion Week, ‘fatshionistas’ celebrate their size and demand more from designers


by Robin Givhan in new york


n the chaos of yellow cabs and black Town Cars that clog the street in front of the Ho- tel Pennsylvania, a young woman, belted into a black jersey skirt and tunic, emerges from a double-parked vehicle. As she cuts her way through a thicket of confused tourists, three facts are evident. One: She moves with grace and confi- dence. The self-assured woman, it turns out, is a model named Rosie Mercado,


which leads to fact two: She is stunning — head- swiveling stunning, a genetic mash-up of Jennifer Lopez and Nicole Scherzinger. And finally: Mercado is large. She is a super-size woman whose size-20-something hips are almost as wide as the door frame through which they pass. This last bit is not a judgment, but a fact. And if American culture made that distinction, Mercado and other plus-size women say, everyone would be better off. Mercado was the face of the second Full Figured


Fashion Week, a late June convergence of designers, retailers, bloggers and activists who descended on this earth-tone hotel abutting Penn Station to discuss the fashion desires of women who are plus-size, cur- vy, thick, voluptuous or fat — all adjectives the partic- ipants embrace. For those who live and work within the plus-size community, FFFW served as a safe space for both de- fiant anger and group jubilation. Pretty clothes, and who gets to wear them, functioned as the lingua fran- ca for a multi-layered conversation about self-es- teem, health, politics and power. In the past two years, a vigorous storm has been


kicked up among plus-size women and their ad- vocates. It has been fueled by a fashion industry that


fashion continued on C9 EXHIBITION REVIEW


Shakespeare Library’s ‘Sea,’ before a murkiness most foul


Folger navigates English seafaring history, when purer mysteries reigned


by Philip Kennicott


The Folger Shakespeare Library exhi- bition “Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination” opened June 10, the same day that a team of government- appointed scientists delivered grim new estimates of how much oil had flowed into the ocean from BP’s Deepwater Ho- rizon since the offshore platform ex- ploded on April 20. The Folger exhibition is about naviga-


tion, exploration and literary and spirit- ual encounters with the sea from the age of Shakespeare to the 1750s. But wander through its collection of books, charts and nautical objects, and it is hard not


to sense a direct connection between the heroic endeavor of the ocean’s coloniz- ers and the present moment. “Lost at Sea” yields, in the end, to the Sea Is Lost. Although it’s not explicitly mentioned in the show, the exhibition is a manifes- tation of what scholars have begun call- ing “the new thalassology.” Borrowing the Greek word for the sea, thalassa, new thalassologists are turning schol- arly attention to large bodies of water in an effort to write a deeper history of that part of the world that isn’t land and to escape the terrestrial preoccupations of old-fashioned political, regional, cultur- al and intellectual history. Much of it is high-end bunkum, but it’s hard to quib- ble with this statement of purpose from Steven Mentz, one of the exhibition’s two curators: “We need Shakespeare’s ocean now, because late-twentieth-cen- tury culture has frayed our connections


exhibition continued on C2 BOOK WORLD


Recipe for romance and financial meltdown D


by Ron Charles


on’t let that cozy title turn you away from Allegra Goodman’s new nov- el. Although “The Cookbook Col-


lector” sounds like something about a Po- tato Peel Pie-making cat who solves mys- teries, it’s actually a thoughtful story about the disruptions of the early 21st century. Yes, it’s awfully charming, but the


book’s charm is grounded by a searching contemplation of contemporary values in the age of sudden fortunes, sensational bankruptcies and terrorist attacks. This is, after all, the gracious world of Allegra Goodman, whose most recent adult nov- el, “Intuition,” shed her sprightly wit on cancer research. I can’t think of anyone else who manages that precarious tone so well, balanced with Zenlike tranquillity between genuine mirth and heartfelt de- spair. She describes modern life in stories as witty and astute as Zoë Heller’s or Claire Messud’s but without a drop of bit- terness.


THE COOKBOOK COLLECTOR


By Allegra Goodman Dial. 394 pp. $26


PHOTOS BY HELAYNE SEIDMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST


PRETTY GREAT: Clockwise, from far left: A plus-size model for K. Renee Designs; model Rosie Mercado, the Face of Full Figured Fashion Week, in a panel discussion at the New York event; an Igigi outft on the runway; designer Monif Clarke in her showroom with assistant Brandon Coates and customer Heather Sells; a Monif C. gown.


“The Cookbook Collector” follows the


gonzo trajectory of the Nasdaq, and since each chapter is dated — from the heady autumn of 1999 to the chastened spring of 2002 — anyone old enough to drive will suspect what’s approaching. (It also in- cludes such an effervescent description of the stock market crash that you’ll almost forget why you can’t retire until you’re 92.) For several hundred pages, though, this delightful romantic comedy beguiles us into ignoring gravity, like those giddy investors who imagined they were gen- iuses.


At the center are two sisters in their


20s living in Northern California: Emily, the older, responsible one, is a financial wunderkind whose data-storage com- pany, Veritech, will propel her onto the Forbes list. The only person who couldn’t care less is her free-spirit sister, Jess, who’s pursuing a graduate degree in phi- losophy and working part time in a used- book store. She’d rather save trees than money.


book world continued on C4


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