Françoise Wilson lives just outside of Kerrville, Texas. She says she began wearing a mask early in the pandemic. She’s now found a way to add a bit of “glam” to her favorite black cloth masks.
“I liked the sequins and I liked the painted-on stuff, but those kind of things, after a few washings, they fall off. So I was wondering, you know, I can’t sew anything, I can’t glue anything, I can’t paint anything because it’ll come off; how about if I just clip something on? And then a light went off, and it was like, you know, clip-on earrings, there we go! So where do you get clip-on earrings? Estate sales! So that’s what I started looking for. And I found some really cool ones.”
“I’ll get looks, and you can tell the people are smiling from behind their masks, mostly women. Once in a while little kids will point and ask me, you know, ‘What’s that?’”
“When I lived abroad, I would keep a journal. But, for the everyday, not normally. But I knew that from early on that we were going to be living through history; we’re living history now. People will talk about this like they talk about the pandemic, you know, a hundred years ago. So, you know, I do newspaper clippings and comics that refer to it. You know, when the first face mask appeared in comics, I started cutting those out. It’s a record of this experience.”
