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Rachel Ashwell and Barbara Boxer
(Page 2 of 4)
Rachel Ashwell "Don't leave school just yet." Deep pillows and feather beds are at hand. Plump armchairs wear slouchy white denim or cream linen slipcovers. Worn tables bear honorable scars and nicks. In the unpretentious slipcover and flea market world of Rachel Ashwell, coziness counts more than pedigree. A self-taught designer and entrepreneur who grew up in Britain, Rachel, forty-six, says her biggest fear is mediocrity. To her, an ordinary decor looks familiar — because it's been done before. "Mediocrity is a superficial effort — what happens when a project is done without passion," she says. Her company, Rachel Ashwell Shabby Chic, based in Los Angeles, celebrates plain design and refurnished furniture, edited by a strict "Less is more" principle. "I can't bear cluttered closets. A cluttered cupboard is a cluttered mind," she says. The concept has lured customers around the world, including celebrities like Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson. Her fifteen-year-old company, with more than $10 million in revenues and 125 employees, is expanding quickly. In addition to six stores, five books, and a TV show associated with the company, Rachel Ashwell Shabby Chic spread in 2004 to department stores like Bloomingdale's (with a new line of sleepwear) and Target stores (with bedding, furniture, rugs, and other products for the kitchen, living room, and elsewhere). Despite her successful track record, until recently Rachel was uncomfortable if someone she didn't know approached her at a party. She explains why in her letter, written to herself at age sixteen, when she dropped out of school. "In America people think of everybody in Britain as Cambridge- or Oxford-educated and madly intellectual, but they're not," she says. After dropping out, she found employment as an au pair in Britain and moved in with the family she worked for. A few months later, she relocated into a room in a Council Flats building, which was government-subsidized and "pretty Dickensian," she says. Rachel's working-class floor mates included quite a few drunks. Every tenant shared a hall bathroom. You had to put change into a meter for hot water. In time, of course, she became an expert at replacing hard edges and dark gloom with soft cushions and pastel colors. That feat is detailed in The Shabby Chic Home, an account of Rachel's unglitzy renovation of her beloved Malibu home, which she later sold. Her special alchemy lies in the way she allows a room to answer to a primal need, described by poet Maya Angelou: "The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned."
Barbara Boxer "Don't be so quick to dismiss another human being." After short careers as a stockbroker and a journalist, Barbara Boxer, now sixty-five, found her voice as an advocate in politics. It was like a race car at full throttle suddenly finding traction. Barely five feet tall, Boxer, a passionate champion of the environment, childhood education, and women's rights, sometimes has to stand on a box to see over the podium at press conferences. In recent years, the Brooklyn-born Democrat has become better known for criticizing key Republican moves. She fiercely censured the war in Iraq. She signed a House member's complaint about Ohio voting problems during the 2004 presidential election, which forced Congress to debate the snafu before certifying President Bush's victory. Her vehement opposition to Condoleezza Rice's nomination as secretary of state inspired a skit on Saturday Night Live. Far from scaring voters away, Barbara's boldness seems to have endeared her to Californians. Running for her third term in 2004, she received more than 6.9 million votes, the highest number ever tallied for any Senate candidate, beating opponent Bill Jones by twenty percentage points. There's also talk of a Boxer for President campaign on Internet blogs, but she says she has no interest in running. Though her success looks effortless, she had to learn that passion, clarity, and determination are not enough to ensure victory. The first time she ran for office — a spot on the Marin County Board of Supervisors — she lost. "One of my biggest faults when I started out in politics was being judgmental. At that young age, I didn't really have the patience to hear why someone might have a different point of view from mine," she said. Four years later, in 1976, she ran again and won. This letter is for the thirty-two-year-old Boxer, mother of a seven-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl, as she was preparing to run for office for the first time.
Copyright © 2006 by Ellyn Spragins. Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Tags: Women's Studies, Biographies & Memoirs About the Author Ellyn Spragins is an editor at large for Fortune Small Business. She wrote the "Love and Money" column in the New York Times business section for three years. She first edited five of these letters for an issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. She lives in Pennington, New Jersey, with her family. More by Ellyn Spragins |
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